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Everybody but the gentry's on slim rations. " Hari had helped Yugo escape that sweltering work years before. In vast vaults, Page 164 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html wood and coarse cellulose passed automatically from the solar cav- erns to vats of weak acid. Passing through deep rivers of acid hydrolyzed this to glucose. Now people, not rugged tiktoks, had to mix niter suspen- sions and ground phosphate rock in a carefully calculated slurry. With prepared organics stirred in. a vast range of yeasts and their derivatives emerged. 'The Emperor has to do somethin'!" Yugo said. "Or I, " Hari said. But what? "People're sayin' we have to scrap all the tiktoks, not just the Five Hun- dred series, and do everything ourselves. " "Without them, we would be reduced to hauling bulk foods across the Galaxy by hypership and worms an absurdity. Trantor will fall. " "Hey, we can do better than tiktoks. " "My dear Yugo, that is what I call Echo-Nomics. You're repeating con- ventional wisdom. One must consider the larger picture. Trantorians aren't the same people who built this world. They're softer. " "We are trapped between tin deities and carbon angels, " Voltaire rasped. "These... creatures?" Joan asked in a thin, awed voice. "This alien fog quite godlike in a way. More dispassionate than real, carbon-based humans. You and I are like nei- ther... now. " They floated above what Voltaire termed SysCity the system repre- sentation of Trantor, its cyber-self. For Joan's human referents he had transformed the grids and layers into myriad crystalline walkways, linking saber-sharp towers. Dense connections webbed the air. Motes connected to other motes in intricate cross-bonds and filmed the ground. This yielded a cityscape like a brain. A visual pun, he thought. "I hate this place, " she said. "You'd prefer a Purgatory simulation?" "It is so... chilling. " The alien minds above them were a murky mist of connections. "They seem to be studying us, " Voltaire sad, "with decidedly unsympathetic eyes. " 1 stand read); should they attack. " She swung a huge sword "And L should their weapons of choice be syllogisms. " trated by hundreds of separate processors. There was a profound differ- ence, he felt not saw, but felt, deep in his analog persuasion between the digital and the smooth, the continuous. The fog was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to happen, implicit in the fundamental computation. And within it all... the strangeness. He could not comprehend these diffuse spirits. They were the remnants of all the computational-based societies, throughout the Galaxy, who had somehow but why? condensed here on Trantor. They were truly alien minds. Convoluted, byzan-tine. (Voltaire knew the origin of that word, from a place of spires and bulbous mosques, but all that was dust, while the useful word remained. ) They did not have human pur- poses. And they used the tiktoks. The thrust of the mechanicals' agenda, Voltaire saw, was rights the expansion of liberty to the digital wilderness. Even Dittos might fall under such a rule. Were not copies of digital peo- ple still people? So the argument went. Immense freedom to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, rebuild your own mind from top to bottom came along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, all digital presences were like ghosts. Only with digital prosthetics could they reach feebly into the concrete uni- Page 165 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html reached into every avenue of natural, real lives. Parasites, nothing less. Voltaire saw all this in a flash as he absorbed data and history from a billion sources, integrated the streams, and passed them on to his beloved Joan. That was why humans had rejected digital life for so long... but was that all! No: a larger presence lurked beyond his vision. Another actor on this shadowy stage. Beyond his resolution, alas. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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