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ception.
Abruptly he felt a spike of remembrance pain, a sharp nostalgia for a time and
place he knew was no more than dust blowing in winds... all on some
" these people had lost. Earth itself, gone\ How could they let such a
odd
travesty occur?
Voltaire simmered with frustrated anger and got to work. Throughout his life,
as he had scribbled his plays aid amassed a fortune, he had always taken
refuge in his labors.
To run his background that was his job. Strange
" !" " " " M phrase.
"
Somewhere within him, an agent ferreted out the expert programs which
understood how to create his exterior frame. He had to do it, though, sweat
breaking out upon his linen, muscles straining against what? He could see
nothing.
GREGORY BEN FORD
He split the tasks. Part of him knew what truly happened, though the
core-Voltaire felt only manual labor.
platform in question. A task-agent explained that this was at a rate in-
versely proportional to the running space they had captured though this
explanation was quite opaque to the core-Self.
Small pieces escaped faster. So for security, he divided the entire sim,
including himself (and Joan, an agent reminded him they were connected,
through tiny roots) into ever finer slices. These ran on myriad platforms,
wherever space became available.
Slowly, his externals congealed about him.
He could make a tree limb blow in the breeze, articulating gently... all
thanks to a few giga-slots of space left open during a momentary hand-
shake protocol, as gargantuan accounting programs shifted, on a Bank
Exchange layer.
Stitching back together the whole Self, all from the sum of slivers, was
itself a job he farmed out to microservers. He imagined himself as a man made
like a mountain of ants. From a distance, perhaps convincing. Up close, one
had to wonder.
But the one doing the wondering was the ant mountain itself.
His own visceral sense of Self was that rock-solid, too, just a patched-
in slug of digits? Or a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together?
Was either an-
swer better than the other?
and cones responding differently to light. A program traced light rays from
his retina to the outside "world, " lines running opposite to the real world,
to calculate what he could see. Like the eye itself, it computed fine details
at the center of vision, shading off to rougher patches at the edge. Objects
out of sight could still cast glows or shadows into the field of vision, so
had to be kept crudely in the program. Once he looked away, the delicate dew-
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
drops on a lush rose would collapse into a crude block of opaque backdrop.
Knowing this, he tried to snap his head back around and catch the pro-
gram off guard, glimpse a gray world of clumsy form-fitting squares and
blobs and always failed. Vision fluttered at twenty-two frames per second at
best; the sim could retrace itself with ease in that wide a wedge of time.
"Ah, Newton!" Voltaire shouted to the oblivious crowds who paced end-
lessly through their tissue-thin streets. "You knew optics, but now I merely
by asking myself a question can fathom light more deeply than thee!"
Newton himself assembled on the cobblestones, lean face clotted with
blue-black anger. "I labored over experiments, over mathematics,
differentials, ray tracings "
"And I have all that " Voltaire laughed happily, awed by the presence of such
an intellect " running on background]"
Newton bowed elaborately and vanished.
Voltaire realized that his eyes had no need to be better than real eyes.
"To the likes of you and me, are they not?"
Newton sniffed. "Frenchman! You could learn a bit of humility. "
"I shall have to subscribe to a higher university for that. "
A Puritan scowl. "You could do with a lecture and a lashing. "
"Do not tempt me with foreplay, sir. "
Suddenly he felt tilted, as if off balance. The word university had keyed
turbulence in him... and a Presence. It came as a black wedge, a yawning crack [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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