Recursion

“I have a few ideas up my sleeve.”

“How will we know if we’ve succeeded?”

“The you and I who are here at the moment won’t know. If the you and I on your spaceship are hearing these words, it means we succeeded.”

Herb said nothing. A nasty idea had just occurred to him.

“So, what happens to us then, when we’ve finished our mission? Do we just die? Or do we spend the rest of our lives here wandering around the processors of the Necropolis?”

“When you’ve finished your work for me, how you then choose to live your life is up to you. As long as there is something to process the idea of you, you will think that you think, and therefore, you am what you am.”

They finally came to the foot of the cable. Silver-grey and perfectly smooth, Herb could see himself dimly reflected in the dull sheen of its metal. The cable disappeared into the tile floor, giving no hint of the tremendous tension trapped beneath the ground.

Johnston ran an apparent hand over the cable’s surface.

“I can’t feel anything,” he said. “That means the VNM that made up this cable must have been functioning correctly. There is no room for any margin of error in a space elevator.”

He turned to explain to Herb. “We’re taking advantage of the fact that the VNM that was the seed for the Necropolis couldn’t suicide properly. The building block machines still have their senses and processing spaces intact. We’re using them now to give us life.”

“I guessed as much,” Herb lied.

“Sure. Come on, there’re no clues here. Let’s take the scenic route into space. We’re going to try to get on board one of those ships and steal a little slice of processing time from its brain. We’re going to take on a life in a computer’s dreams. Isn’t that poetic?”

There were rooms and walkways built into the outer skin of the space elevator.

“Imagine having a corner office in this place!”

“You wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Johnston pointed out. “The windows don’t fit properly.”

“You know what I mean,” Herb said.

From the streets, Herb remembered, the space elevator looked like a very tall skyscraper. Get up close and you might not even realize that there was anything odd about it. From where they were now standing, looking out of a wide picture window just a few hundred meters above the ground, it was almost possible to believe they were looking out over an Earth city. Almost possible, thought Herb. Only if he didn’t look up to see the stacks and stacks of silent spaceships floating high above. Only if he didn’t look down too carefully to see the way the buildings below had stretched and deformed. Only if he didn’t look at those long metal creepers ru

And through it all, the yellow-and-black-striped metal bees hummed back and forth.

“Those yellow pod things. What are they doing?” asked Herb.

“I don’t know,” said Johnston. “They’re too big to be just observation pods. There must be some pretty powerful equipment stuck inside them. Maybe we’ll find out up there. Come on.”

The journey into space took longer than Herb might have guessed: Johnston couldn’t seem to jump them more than a couple of floors at a time.

“There’s no clear line of sight up to the top,” he explained, as he and Herb stood several thousand meters up the building, frustrated again at how few floors they had jumped.

Their journey became one of flickering movement as their consciousness appeared on one floor just long enough for Johnston to find a path to the next. Herb watched the Necropolis recede below them as they slowly climbed to the stars, the elongated towers of the city falling away as the pair of them rose to meet the layers of spaceships that hung above.

The outer limits of the Necropolis began to resolve themselves. The city appeared to have spread itself over a considerable part of the planet’s surface before the ongoing decay in the integrity of the reproductive machines finally set in. The bounds of the Necropolis were ragged, the towers out there having stretched themselves too high before collapsing under their own weight. The city didn’t so much come to an end as fade into the surrounding countryside. Herb shivered and wondered what it would be like to wander through those forsaken lands.

Johnston was his only unmoving point of reference. He stood next to Herb, his face set in quiet concentration as they traveled upwards. Behind him the room appeared to flicker: sometimes it grew larger, sometimes smaller. Occasionally the windows vanished, cracked and blown out into the thi

Not for the first time, Herb shivered at the thought of what he had agreed to fight.

They had risen so high Herb could now make out the curve of the planet. They were approaching the first layer of spaceships, spread out above them like checkers on a board, vanishing into the distance in all directions, silver-grey and almost disk-shaped except for a love-heart indentation. They rose through the first layer and continued, past a second and a third, climbing into the night.

The flickering movement suddenly stopped.

“I need a rest,” Johnston muttered. He removed his hat and took a white handkerchief from his breast pocket. He mopped his forehead with it and then carefully replaced his hat, tilting it at a jaunty angle. Herb wandered to the window for a better view of his surroundings. Looking down through the crystal lattice of spaceships, he could see the ball of the planet, far below. He felt a wave of dizziness as he realized that if he fell out of the window now, he would probably miss the planet as he went down. The thought was ridiculous.

Johnston was refolding his handkerchief. “We can’t go on any further by this route,” he said. “We’re now approaching the end point of the elevator; beyond here everything was constructed from perfectly functioning VNM stock. It had to be, otherwise it wouldn’t have held together.”

He gave a deep sigh and pushed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Whew. I’m rather hungry. It’s amazing what conditioned responses can do to you. Anyway. We’re going to have to make a jump into the unknown. I’m guessing that the end of the elevator is not that far above us. It will probably be in geosynchronous orbit with the base. I’m hoping that a docking station was completed, possibly even using the same VNM that later seeded the planet below. There must be something there that could host us.”

“And if there isn’t?” asked Herb.

“Then we’ll never know about it. Our consciousness will just fade from here, and the Herb and Robert back home will never know what we have learned.”

“Oh.”

“Not to worry. I beamed our consciousnesses to other points in the Enemy Domain, too. There’s another pair of us in the Necropolis. One set should get back at least.”

Herb frowned. “It will still be like dying to us, though, surely?”

“Ah. Don’t worry about that. Are you ready?”

Herb gripped Johnston by the sleeve.

“Hang on. Let’s talk this over.”