Danlo touched the scar above his eye, and he stared at the sunflowers bursting golden out of their black stone vase. Then he looked at Hanuman. There stood his best friend, burdened, unhappy, doomed, trembling with unutterable pain, yet in his own way, exalted. He had his own burning vision, his own unique connection with the forces of the universe. He has the look of a prophet, Danlo thought. Hanuman walked over to the fire and stood there, wild-eyed and fey, as if he, and he alone, had been called to accomplish some great task. Upon his sad, beautiful face was written the conviction that all the forces of evolution since time's beginning were converging upon him, that the very future of humanity depended upon his will, his genius, his strength.
'Do you remember the day in the Shih Grove?' Danlo asked. 'You said then that the animals and the plants, and people ... do not feel true pain.'
'I remember,' Hanuman said. 'I was wrong, and I was right. Their pain is real. They suffer – everything does. But next to the pain of the gods, it's nothing.'
'Pain is pain,' Danlo said. 'And you are still a man.'
'That's mostly true. Do you suppose, however, that the cells in my brain can't foreknow what it's like to grow without bound? They know, they remember. Inside my brain, there's a burning more brilliant than any fire. It's beyond all colour, beyond even light, and it goes on and on and on.'
'There is a way to make the burning stop,' Danlo said.
'No, Danlo, not in this universe.'
So saying, Hanuman went over near the fireplace where there stood a table. He beckoned Danlo closer, the better to view the table. It was a low, square, ancient-looking table, the kind of table one might sit at with a friend in enjoyment of coffee and conversation. As Danlo could see, the tabletop was wrought of some translucent substance such as clary or glass. It was cold and smooth to the touch. It had a dead, greyish look to it, and Danlo could not imagine why anyone would wish to make such an ugly thing.
'The whole universe is on fire,' Hanuman said. He held the cold, black sphere motionless above the table. 'Haven't you ever wondered what makes the universe the way it is?'
Just then, the tabletop came alive with light. Blue dots and clusters of red, amoeba-like structures flashed beneath the glass. Danlo realized that these colourful arrays were likely being generated by liquid crystals inside the table.
'What kind of computer is this?' he asked.
'Properly, it's not a computer at all,' Hanuman said as he rolled the black sphere from hand to hand. 'It's just a display table.'
'And what is it displaying?'
Hanuman squeezed the black sphere and looked at it for a while. 'Dolls,' he finally said. 'It's displaying dolls. Haven't you ever seen the dolls before?'
'I have heard of... artificial life,' Danlo said. 'These are information structures, yes? It is said that computers can bring information to life.'
'In a way, information is life,' Hanuman said. 'And the computer is the universe in which it lives.'
'Which computer?'
'This computer,' Hanuman said.
Here, he held the black sphere before the firelight, and he stared at it as if he were an astronomer peering into the very heart of the universe. He explained that the sphere was a special kind of computer that the cetics make. It was fifteen cubic inches of crystalline neurologics of the same kind used in the creation of firestones; as with any good firestone, it generated an almost infinitely dense information field. He called it his 'universal computer' and he told Danlo that it supported entire information ecologies of life.
'The table will display this life,' he said. 'Shall I show you a picture of what's occurring inside this computer?'
The tabletop was now a smooth plane glittering with bits of light. There were millions of these light bits, which winked on and off in a blizzard of colours: crimson, sapphire, violet and green. And magenta, rose, flame red, indigo and aquamarine and a hundred other colours. Each light bit represented a certain configuration of information stored inside the universal computer. The light bits – or rather the information they represented – were like artificial atoms, each of which was programmed with unique properties. These fundamental information structures existed in the cybernetic space that the cetics call the alam al-mithral. This is the space in which images are real, the space halfway between the real world and the Platonic world of ideals. On Old Earth, a thousand years before the first computers, Avicenna the Wise had posited a realm of existence midway between matter and spirit. For millennia, the cetics had applied all their ingenuity to creating such a realm; it was the claim of the cyber-shamans that they had succeeded. Many cyber-shamans possessed black spheres like Hanuman's. Many cyber-shamans had created and programmed their own unique information atoms in order to evolve life made of pure information.
'This is the tenth universe I've designed,' Hanuman said. 'It's the best, most fascinating thing I've ever done, this creating of universes.'
In fact, he had not created his universe as a finished piece, as one might sculpt a block of diamond or weave a tapestry. Rather, he had created information atoms and rules by which these atoms interacted with their environment, and with each other. This was all that he had done.
Other professionals, of course, experimented with artificial life in different ways. Some ecologists liked to shape their universes as they evolved, continually adding new programs and editing out various kinds of informational life. But the cyber-shamans disdained this personal interference as inelegant and lacking in profundity. In this tenth universe of Hanuman's, he had created exactly one hundred and eighty-seven information configurations and had programmed twenty-three laws specifying the ways they might combine with each other. He had done this five hours previously. And then he had let the universal computer run. As he held the black sphere up to his forehead in contemplation of what was occurring inside, it was running still.
'But why this game?' Danlo asked. 'Why play games ... now?'
'Do you think this is a game?'
'You are making models of the universe, yes? Models of different universes ... that might reveal the possibilities of our own.'
'I already know about this universe, Danlo.'
'But evolution– '
'The only evolution that matters any more,' Hanuman said, 'is that which we might control.'
'Such as the evolution of the dolls?'
'Of course,' Hanuman said. 'Shall I arrange a display of their evolution?'
'If you would like.'
Danlo clasped his hands behind his back as he stared down at the tabletop. Now the cloud of coloured lights was not quite so chaotic. In various places beneath the glass, with a quickness almost impossible to apprehend, points of vermilion light swirled around green light bits, and tiny aquamarine light bursts interpenetrated those of crimson. In this way, the one hundred and eighty-seven colours of light combined to form thousands of different kinds of information molecules, and then, thousands of thousands. The glass sparkled with brilliant new patterns of information almost geometric in their perfection. The patterns vibrated and organized themselves and rotated against each other as they combined to make ever more complex patterns; or they absorbed each other and grew, or sometimes, they annihilated each other in showers of gold and purple light. And then other information molecules would feed on this light, and all this feeding and growing and making of new patterns happened so quickly that Danlo dared not blink his eyes, lest he lose sight of the overarching pattern that was beginning to emerge.
'Loshisha shona,' Danlo whispered. 'These lights are beautiful.'
The lights were indeed beautiful, beautiful with an evolving order that emerged from chaos. No one could predict what this order might be. It was impossible, even in theory, to foreknow what forms might evolve within the alam al-mithral space of Hanuman's computer.
'This program has been running for five hours. The molecules you see evolved within the first five nanoseconds.'
'Then the current state of the program is far beyond this, yes?'
'Far beyond.'
'How long will you let the program run? What kind of doll ... are you trying to create?'
Hanuman tapped his fingernail against his temple. He said, 'I've created nine other universes, but I've never let one run to its halt state. It's inelegant to seek some sort of solution to life or some final, perfect form of life.'
'I understand,' Danlo said. He looked up and nodded, and he wondered if Hanuman were telling himself the truth.
'It's the dynamics of artificial life that are beautiful,' Hanuman said. 'Making the information atoms and the universal laws so perfectly that everything occurring in the universe is without flaw or taint of ugliness. I've never been able to tolerate ugliness.'
Danlo bowed his head, then, and he looked down to see the information molecules combining into long chains, the chains knitting themselves into gleaming membranes. After a while, these membranes had grown and folded into globules that looked something like organic cells. Only they were not creations of protein, lipids or RNA; they were only of light, or information coded into light. Each information cell was a tiny jewel glittering with ten million points of light. He watched the cells collect together into a cluster that vibrated with an astonishing brilliance of colours, and he looked over to see Hanuman watching, too.
'What's beautiful,' Danlo said, 'is that a creator can be astonished by his own creations.'
For a while, as the evening deepened and the fire burned low in the fireplace, Hanuman showed Danlo how his creations had evolved into dolls. To recapitulate five hours of evolution in a few moments, he speeded up the table display. Danlo watched as the cells clumped together and exchanged gleaming bits of information and combined into new forms; he watched the evolution of simple informational organisms that Hanuman had jokingly named infosoria. From these jewel-like arrays of information evolved new kingdoms of artificial life. Hanuman had classified this life into emerging phyla, and into entirely new classes and orders that had never existed within any cybernetic space. The tabletop, a few square feet of brilliant geometric patterns and flashing glass, could display only the tiniest fraction of this evolution. Even so, the display was a riot of colours that exploded outward and radiated into ten thousand species of artificial life. Many times each second, species mutated and claded off into new species; sometimes these species would remain stable for a moment or two and would fill whole sections of the tabletop with a uniformity of life that Hanuman called a synusia. But always there was movement and mutation and information exchange; there were always new forms and the violence of broken information arrays. A series of ecological communities followed one another so quickly that Danlo could scarcely hold their patterns within his mind. These seres, as they were called, were ever more complex and ever more beautiful. The last sere, which had evolved within the universal computer only an hour earlier, was full of lovely shapes that seemed made of silver light. In the way they grouped together and changed direction without warning, they seemed much like a school of fish. At times, they would nudge each other as they vied for space; or they would vibrate and send out waves of information molecules, and when they did this, they resembled nothing so much as a herd of bellowing, silvery seals. Hanuman called them dolls, and he said that soon they would become as intelligent as human beings.
'As you'll see,' Hanuman said, 'they have a complex social organization. They build something like cities – you could call them information arcologies. Most importantly they make weapons, and they make war. What more ominous sign of intelligence should we desire?'
Danlo kept his eyes on the tabletop, and he asked, 'But what does it mean ... to call these dolls intelligent? They are just arrays of information ordered by programs. Each information bit... has no choice in how it interacts with others. Each cell and cell cluster. And each organism is built up of these information bits, yes? Each organism, each doll, everything they do – it is all determined by the programs you made. How can they have will? Or mind? How can such creatures truly be alive?'
'You ask such obvious questions,' Hanuman said. 'The deeper question is: How is it that we seem conscious of our will? Why is it that we seem to be alive?'
'But, Hanu ... we are alive.'
'Are we really?'
'Yes!'
'Aren't we made of atoms of matter? Bits of carbon and oxygen that combine according to universal laws? Aren't these laws programmed into the very fabric of our universe? And if this is so, if each neuron in your wild, brilliant brain fires solely according to the laws of chemistry, then why should you think that you have any will at all?'
'But our will,' Danlo said, 'our consciousness cannot be reduced ... to the firing of neurons. And the mind of our cells cannot be reduced to chemistry. Mind cannot be understood by a reduction to matter – to the interactions of smaller and smaller pieces of matter. There is no smallest piece of matter, I think. If matter is infinitely reducible, then it is not really reducible at all. Not reducible in any way that could explain consciousness.'
Hanuman gazed at the black sphere resting in his hands, and he asked, 'But what is consciousness, Danlo?'
Danlo was quiet for a moment, and then he said, 'Consciousness is not anything. Not any thing. Consciousness ... is. It is just what it is, nothing more.'
'But what is matter?'
High above Danlo, stretched between the angles of the ceiling and the wall in the room's corner, there was a spider's web, as large and intricate as any he had ever seen. In the light of the fire, the web was all shimmering gold, and he wondered how a simple spider could know how to weave such a glorious thing. He relived a part of his great remembrance, then. He stared at the spider's web, and this afterimage of the Elder Eddas burned inside him: Matter is memory. Matter, he knew, was not bits of smaller, lifeless bits, but rather the ordered flow of something he could think of only as mindstuff. Matter is mind, he remembered, and he told Hanuman this as he stared up at the lovely web that some unseen spider had made.