Egan, Greg - Diaspora

VIP免费

2024-12-08 1 0 438.67KB 161 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

DIASPORA

Greg Egan

ISBN: 0-06-105798-3

Part One

Yatima surveyed the Doppler-shifted stars around the polis, following the frozen, concentric waves of

color across the sky from expansion to convergence. Ve wondered what account they should give of

themselves when they finally caught up with their quarry. They'd brought no end of questions to ask, but

the flow of information couldn't all be one-way. When the Transmuters demanded to know "Why have

you followed us? Why have you come so far?", where should ve begin?

Yatima had read pre-Introdus histories told on a single level, bounded by the fictions that individuals

were as indivisible as quarks, and planetary civilizations nothing less than self-contained universes.

Neither vis own history nor the Diaspora's would fit between those imaginary lines. The real world was

full of larger structures, smaller structures, simpler and more complex structures than the tiny portion

comprising sentient creatures and their societies, and it required a profound myopia of scale and

similarity to believe that everything beyond this shallow layer could be ignored. It wasn't just a question

of choosing to bury yourself in a closed world of synthetic scapes; the fleshers had never been immune

to this myopia, nor had the most outward-looking citizens. No

doubt at some time in their history the Transmuters had suffered from it too.

Of Course, the Transmitters would already be aware of the very large, very dead celestial machinery that

had driven the Diaspora to Swift and beyond. Their question would be, "Why have you come so much

further? Why have you left your own people behind?"

Yatima couldn't speak for vis fellow traveler, but the answer for ver lay at the opposite end of the scale,

in the realm of the very simple, and the very small.

ORPHANOGENESIS

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 025 000 000 CST

15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT

The conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to

enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twenty formed partly

in their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance. Sporadically, though, every

teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen with no parents at all.

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (1 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a

digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the

polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of

neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the

biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher

genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool,

with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the

consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to

embrace it recklessly would he to endanger the sanity of every child.

The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a

simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shaper-s: the basic

subprograms employed during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million

interacting shapers could rarely he predicted in advance; in most cases, the only reliable method would

have been to perform every computation that the altered seed itself would have performed ... which was

no different from going ahead and rowing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing_ The

conceptory 's accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the

Konishi mind seed. The highest-level maps were elaborate, multidimensional structures, dwarfing the

seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the citizens of Konishi had used

to gauge the conceptory 's progress over the centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude,

and the sixty-tour possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could be thought of as a

path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom, singling out an instruction code for every field

along the way.

Where it was known that only one code could recd to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map

converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ocher against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields

built the

basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind's overarching design and

the fine details of vital subsystems.

Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait

fields offered a selection of codes, each with a known effect oil the mind's detailed structure, with

variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down to minute differences

in neural architecture less significant than the creases on a flesher's palm. They appeared in shades of

green as wildly contrasting or as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.

The remaining fields-where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could he

made--were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as

gray against white: a mountain peak protruding through a hand of clouds which concealed everything to

the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could

only he discovered firsthand.

Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes

chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand

indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to

choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted

territory.

And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (2 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

The conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of the womb's memory, a single strand of

information suspended in a vacuum of zeroes. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well

have been the last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the womb was a

virtual machine designed to execute the seed's instructions, and a dozen more layers of software led

down to the polis itself, a lattice of flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive

data, could do nothing, change nothing-but in the womb, the seed's meaning fell into perfect alignment

with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a jacquard loom, it

ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.

When the womb read the seed, the seed's first shaper caused the space around it to be filled with a

simple pattern of data: a single, frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion

perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate neighbors further up or

down the same slope-but each crest was still identical to every other crest, each trough the same as every

other trough. The womb's memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers

stored at each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.

A second wave was added-running askew to the first, modulated with a slow steady rise-carving each

ridge into a series of ascending mounds. Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the

pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients,

establishing a hierarchy of scales.

The fortieth wave plowed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of

its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had

been rendered unique---hut enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to

come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to he scattered across the freshly

calibrated landscape.

In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds---and at first, the instructions they

issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being

read to jump forward along the hit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding

data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was

embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb

began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still

identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the

foundations for a different specialized region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.

The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower's nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern

of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself

with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed

to sculpt abdomen, thorax, or head. Konishi's digital version skimmed off the essence of the process:

divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all

further instructions,

switching specialized subprograms on and off-subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle

on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first roughhewn structures into miracles of filigreed

precision.

By the eighth iteration, the womb's memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no

more would he required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them-hut some

gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (3 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these

networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and

two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-

dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks

like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced pseudorandom stutters. The pulses

flowed through the mazes of construction where the networks were still being formed-where almost

every track was still connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken

by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess junctions, preserving only

those where a sufficient number of pulses was arriving simultaneously-choosing, out of all the countless

alternatives, pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the networks-in-

progress, too-but if they were traveled often enough, other shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It

didn't matter that these first streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help

whittle the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.

In many polises, new citizens weren't grown at all; they were assembled directly from generic

subsystems. But the Konishi method provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain

seamlessness. Systems grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds

of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to fine-tune all the finished

components to ensure that they didn't clash.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though, the infrastructure fields could still stake out

territory for a few standardized subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels

for incoming data-one for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities of all Konishi citizens,

distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the orphan's two-hundredth iteration, the channels

themselves were fully formed, but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for

classifying and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.

Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred meters beneath the Siberian tundra, but via fiber and

satellite links the input channels could bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from

probes orbiting every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests and

oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The first problem of perception

was learning how to choose from this superabundance.

In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired to the controls of the input channels began

issuing a stream of requests for information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a

monotonous stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to non-existent sources of

data. But every psychoblast was innately biased toward finding the polis library (if not, it would have

taken millennia) and the navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through the

channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the animal.

The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went into a spasm of repetition, summoning the

same frozen image of the lion again and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic

change discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back toward experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the orphan's two kinds of proto-curiosity: the

drive to seek out novelty, and the drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning

how to bring in streams of connected information-sequential images of recorded motion, and then more

abstract chains of cross-references-understanding nothing, but wired to reinforce its own behavior when

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (4 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

it struck the right balance between coherence and change.

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through the orphan's classifying networks, leaving

behind, not the fine details-not the spacesuited figure standing on gray-and-white rock against a pitch

black sky; not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a gray swarm of nanomachines--but an

imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The networks discovered the circle/

sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different

artworks, artifacts, and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for "person," and hound

it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon for "citizen," and to the features they

found in common among the many images of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted from the library's data had given rise to a horde

of tiny sub-systems in the input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all

poised and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognizing monomaniacs staring into the

information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.

These traps began to form connections with each other, using them at first just to share their judgments,

to sway each other's decisions. If the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its

linear name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common features seen in

their behavior (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data

triggered a whole cluster of linked traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but

sometimes there was time for overeager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion shape has

been recognized-and though the word "lion" has not yet been detected, the "lion" word-trap is tentatively

firing ... and so are the traps for cub-licking and antelope-chasing.

The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.

By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the traps had developed into an elaborate network

in its own right, and new structures had arisen in this network-symbols which could be triggered by each

other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on its own, had merely been

a template held up to the world to be declared a match or a mismatch a verdict without implications. The

lion symbol could encode an unlimited web of implications-and that web could be tapped at any time,

whether or not a lion was visible.

Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of meaning.

The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet

the matching navigator, needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or

beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to jostle for access to the

output channels, regardless. They used their traps' templates to parrot the sound or image which each

had learned to recognize-and it didn't matter if they uttered the linear words "lion," "cub," "antelope"

into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the inside.

The orphan began to hear itself think.

Not the whole pandemonium; it couldn't give voice-or even gestalt-to everything at once. Out of the

myriad associations every scene from the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain

control of the nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the sky, and

the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in the animals' wake-and more,

much more ... the symbols which won out before the whole scene vanished were:

"Lion chasing antelope."

Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data. The linear words cycled from channel to

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (5 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

channel, distinct against the silence; the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and

again, an idealized reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.

Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached out to the library again.

The orphan's thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly progression-rather, symbols fired in

ever richer and more elaborate cascades-but positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind

resonated with its own strongest ideas. The orphan had learned to single out one or two threads from the

symbols' endless thousand-strand argument. It had learned to narrate its own experience.

The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary of ten thousand words, a short-term

memory, expectations stretching several tau into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it

still had no idea that there was such a thing in the world as itself.

The conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration, scrupulously tracing the effects of the

randomized indeterminate fields. A sentient observer of the same information might have visualized a

thousand delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zerogee crystals, sending out ever-finer

branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read and acted upon, and their influence diffused

from network to network. The conceptory didn't visualize anything; it just processed the data, and

reached its conclusions.

So far, the mutations appeared to have caused no harm. Every individual structure in the orphan's mind

was functioning broadly as expected, and the traffic with the library, and other sampled data streams,

showed no signs of incipient global pathologies.

If a psychoblast was found to be damaged, there was nothing in principle to stop the conceptory from

reaching into the womb and repairing every last malformed structure, but the consequences could he as

unpredictable as the consequences of growing the seed in the first place. Localized "surgery" sometimes

introduced incompatibilities with the rest of the psychoblast, while alterations widespread and thorough

enough to guarantee success could he self-defeating, effectively obliterating the original psychoblast and

replacing it with an assembly of parts cloned from past healthy ones.

But there were risks, too, in doing nothing. Once a psychoblast became self-aware, it was granted

citizenship, and intervention without consent became impossible. This was not a matter of mere custom

or law; the principle was built into the deepest level of the polis. A citizen who spiraled down into

insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and pain, with a mind too damaged to authorize help,

or even to choose extinction. That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and

suffering, inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

So the citizens of Konishi had programmed the conceptory to err on the side of caution. It continued to

observe the orphan closely, ready to terminate psychogenesis at the first sign of dysfunction.

Not long after the five-thousandth iteration, the orphan's output navigator began to fire-and a tug-of-war

began. The output navigator was wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that

showed a response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining itself to the

polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both navigators were wired with a drive to

bring each other into alignment, to connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak

in the same place-a useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphan's chatter of speech and icons

flowed straight back to the library, which completely ignored it.

Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator sent repressor signals into the change-

discriminator networks, undermining the attraction of the library's mesmerizing show, bullying the input

navigator out of its rut. Dancing a weird chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping from scape

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (6 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to talk to.

They caught a thousand random glimpses of the physical world along the way: a radar image of a dust

storm sweeping across the sea of dunes ringing the north polar ice cap of Mars; the faint infrared plume

of a small comet disintegrating in the atmosphere of Uranus-an event that had taken place decades

before, but lingered in the satellite's discriminating memory. They even chanced upon a real-time feed

from a drone weaving its way across the East African savanna toward a pride of lions, but unlike the

library's flowing images this vision seemed intractably frozen, and after a few tau they moved on.

When the orphan stumbled on the address for a

Konishi forum, it saw a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and grays, arranged in a

pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating itself. A fountain sprayed liquid silver

toward a cloud-streaked, burnt-orange sky; as each stream broke apart into mirrored droplets halfway up

its arc, the shiny globules deformed into tiny winged piglets which flew around the fountain, braiding

each others' flight paths and grunting cheerfully before diving back into the pool. Stone cloisters ringed

the square, the inner side of the walkway a series of broad arches and elaborately decorated colonnades.

Some of the arches had been given unusual twists--Eschered or Kleined, skewed through invisible extra

dimensions.

The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and knew the linear words for most of them; the

scape itself was so unremarkable that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed

thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a difference here, though it

could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had

seen before, or the stylized fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more

mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by physiology or physics, but

only by the conventions of gestalt-the need to proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one

primary meaning: I am a citizen.

The orphan addressed the forum: "People."

The linear conversations between the citizens were public, but muted-degraded in proportion to distance

in the scape-and the orphan heard only an unchanging

murmur.

It tried again. "People!"

The icon of the nearest citizen a dazzling multihued form like a stained-glass statue, about two delta

high-turned to face the orphan. An innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphan's angle of

view straight toward the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphan's own icon-

now a crude, unconscious parody of the citizen's-turn the same way.

The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face smiled, and ve said, "Hello, orphan."

A response, at last! The output navigator's feedback detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping

down the restlessness which had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any

system which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.

The orphan parroted: "Hello, orphan."

The citizen smiled again-"Yes, hello"-then turned back to vis friends.

"People! Hello!"

Nothing happened.

"Citizens! People!"

The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked on its satisfaction rating, making the

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (7 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

navigators restless again. Not restless enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.

The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: "People! Hello!" It moved without momentum or

inertia, gravity or friction, merely tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigator's requests for

data, which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphan's point-of-view. The matching

bits from the output navigator determined where and how the orphan's speech and icon were merged into

the scape.

The navigators learned to move close enough to the citizens to be easily heard. Some responded-"Hello,

orphan"-before turning away. The orphan echoed their icons hack at them: simplified or intricate,

rococco or spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of luminous smoke,

or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless

black-hut always the same biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the

letter A in a hundred mad monks' illuminated manuscripts.

Gradually, the orphan's input-classifying networks began to grasp the difference between the citizens in

the forum and all the icons it had seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-

visual gestalt tag-a quality like a distinctive odor for a flesher, though more localized, and much richer in

possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of this new form of data, but now its infotrope a late-

developing structure which had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectors--

began to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a regularity-every

citizen's icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tag--and expressed its dissatisfaction. The

orphan hadn't previously bothered echoing the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a

group of three citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.

The citizen exclaimed angrily, "Don't do that, idiot!"

"Hello!"

"No one will believe you if you claim to be me-least of all me. Understand? Now go away!" This citizen

had metallic, pewter-gray skin. Ve flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.

"No!" The citizen was now sending out a second tag, alongside the original. "See? I challenge you--and

you can't respond. So why bother lying?"

"Hello!"

"Go away '

The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had ever received.

"Hello, citizen!"

The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness. "Don't you know who you are?

Don't you know your own signature?"

Another citizen said calmly, "It must be the new orphan-still in the womb. Your newest co-politan,

Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it."

This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan said, "Lion." It tried mimicking the new

citizen-and suddenly all three of them were laughing.

The third citizen said, "It wants to he you now, Gabriel."

The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, "If it doesn't know its own name, we should call it 'idiot.'"

"Don't be cruel. I could show you memories, little part-sibling." The third citizen's icon was a featureless

black silhouette.

"Now it wants to be Blanca."

The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three responded by chanting strange linear

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (8 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt

sounds which meant nothing--"Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!"-just as the orphan

sent out the gestalt images and tags.

Short-term pattern recognizers seized on the connection, and the orphan joined in the linear chant-ml, _1

continued it for a while, when the others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.

The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to v;> chest and said, "I'm Inoshiro."

The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vi, chest and said, "I'm Gabriel."

The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it

in front of vis trunk, and said, "I'm Blanca."

The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear word they'd spoken, aping their hand

gesture. Symbols had formed for all three of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear

words together-even though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.

The citizen whose icon had made them all chant "Inoshiro" said, "So far so good. But how does it get

name of its own. ,

The one with its tag bound to "Blanca" said, "Orphans name themselves."

The orphan echoed, "Orphans name themselves.'

The citizen bound to "Gabriel" pointed to the one bound to "Inoshiro," and said, "Ve is--?" The citizen

bound to "Blanca" said "Inoshiro."

Then the citizen bound to "Inoshiro" pointed back at ver and said "Ve is ?" This time, the citizen bound

w "Blanca" replied, "Blanca." The orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate

systems which helped make sense of the scape's geometry, and completing the pattern easily even when

no one else did.

Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and said: "Ve is ?" The input navigator spun the

orphan's angle of view, trying to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the

orphan, it moved its point of view backward, closer to the golden-furred citizen-momentarily breaking

step with the output navigator.

Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itself-a crude amalgam of the three Citizens' icons,

all black fur and yellow metal-not just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected

channels, but as a vivid scape-object beside the other three.

This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to "Gabriel" was pointing at.

The infotrope went wild. It couldn't complete the unfinished regularity--it couldn't answer the game's

question for this strange fourth citizen-but the hole in the pattern needed to he filled.

The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and color, out there in the scape ... changes

perfectly mirroring its own random fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens,

sometimes simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerized the regularity detectors for a

while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.

The infotrope combined and recombined all the factors at hand, and set a short-term goal: making the

pewter-skinned "Inoshiro" icon change, the way the fourth citizen's icon was changing. This triggered a

faint anticipatory firing of the relevant symbols, a mental image of the desired event. But though the

image of a wiggling, Pulsating citizen-icon easily won control of the gestalt output channel, it wasn't the

"Inoshiro" icon that changed-just the fourth citizen's icon, as before.

The input navigator drifted of its own accord hack into the same location as the output navigator, and

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txt (9 of 161)16-2-2006 21:34:12

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/Greg%20Egan%20-%20Diaspora.txtDIASPORAbyGregEgan(C)1998ISBN:0-06-105798-3PartOneYatimasurveyedtheDoppler-shiftedstarsaroundthepolis,followingthefrozen,concentricwavesofcoloracrosstheskyfromexpansiontoconvergence.Vewonderedwhataccounttheyshouldgiveofthemselveswhenthey...

展开>> 收起<<

Egan, Greg - Diaspora.pdf

共161页,预览9页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Egan, Greg - Diaspora

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: