Hunt looked at her with a curious expression for a moment, and then redirected it at Danchekker. “Well, maybe I can introduce you to one who won’t,” he told them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
If Nixie’s case was typical, there was indeed something immediately apparent that set her kind apart from other Jevlenese and from Terrans and Ganymeans, too, for that matter: When neurally coupled into VISAR, her mode of interaction with the system was entirely different from anything that VISAR had handled before.
For one thing, she was able to retain full awareness of her surroundings at the same time as she experienced the sensory environment communicated by the machine-she could refocus her attention between one and the other, in a manner similar to the normal ability of anybody to watch a movie and follow what was happening in the room. With most users, the system-generated data-stream took over the sensory apparatus, suppressing external sensations completely. And for another, she showed an extraordinary capability that nobody could quite explain, of interacting in a way that went beyond the regular trafficking of sensory information and motor signals, seeming to access the inner processes of the machine itself. This had the effect of reversing the normal state of affairs of machine-organism interaction and adding a new dimension to VISAR’s perceptual universe that was evidently unprecedented.
Hunt had never before heard a computer express genuine awe.
“This is astounding!” VISAR exuberated. “It’s out there! Physical space! Volume, void, continuity, extent. The implicit geometry of the entire domain of a three-variable real-number field, compressed, embodied, and contained in an instantaneous, all-embracing experience… I mean, I can feel it, sense it extending away… form without shape, structure without substance, enveloping yet describing…”
“My God, it’s getting lyrical,” Hunt murmured. They were using a regular voice channel to communicate with VISAR, since their conscious faculties needed to be free to follow what was going on.
“Extraordinary,” Danchekker agreed.
Nixie, relaxing back in one of the neuro couplers in the UNSA labs and looking as if she was enjoying herself, moved her head to gaze up at a corner of the room where the planes of two walls and the ceiling converged. VISAR responded in wonder. “The superset of point, line, curve, and plane reduced to a perceptual gestalt. The inherent beauty of mathematics, extracted and crystallized. Logical rigor made tangible. Infinity of infinitesimals. Continuum of manifolds…”
Nixie raised an arm and moved it across her field of vision.
“Change and derivative, differential equations coming alive. Choreography of vectors. Animated momentum. Forces in concert, locked in balances of symmetry-”
“VISAR, knock it off,” Hunt told it. “Don’t forget that you’re still juggling with the whole Thurien civilization. For Christ’s sake don’t have a seizure now.”
“So this is the reality that you live in naturally!” VISAR said.
“What is? That who live in?”
“You-humans, Ganymeans. You beings who describe yourselves as existing outside. This is the universe which the data encode.”
Hunt frowned. “Well, yes… I guess so. But I always thought you knew as much about it as we did. More, in fact.”
“You don’t understand,” VISAR said. “Until this moment, I’ve only dealt with symbolic representations of what you call observable reality. Processing the model and comprehending what it stands for are two different things. This is the first time I’ve ever really understood what ‘outside’ means.”
Danchekker looked bemused. “Are you saying that this… young lady sees things differently, VISAR?” he asked.
“No,” VISAR replied. “I see things differently!” Hunt had the uncanny feeling that he could almost sense the machine quivering with excitement. “In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything. I am Nixie! I’m inside her head, looking out!”
Hunt and Danchekker exchanged blank looks, while Nixie continued taking in the surroundings and VISAR rapturized about optical wave fronts and the harmonies of gradient fields.
Shilohin, who was sitting near the foot of the recliner, stared at the wall in distant silence, then at last turned to look back at the two Terran scientists. “I think VISAR is trying to say that Nixie is somehow able to invert the normal coupling process,” she said slowly. “Everything communicated into VISAR is first encoded from the real-world forms comprehensible to us, into the constructs which a machine manipulates internally. Even with the Thurien method of bypassing the sensory channels, the input to the machine is still encoded from representations in the same brain areas that those channels terminate in. So mathematical encodings are all that VISAR has ever seen.”
“You mean it’s never seen ‘reality’ at all,” Hunt murmured.
“Do you imagine that we do?” Shilohin answered.
Hunt stared at her for a moment, then sat back as he recalled what he had said to Gina about photons on the day she first appeared at his apartment: The entire reality that was “out there” consisted wholly of photons impinging on nerve endings. There wasn’t anything else. Everything perceived beyond that was a creation of neural processes.
And if that were so, what kind of a conceptual reality would VISAR have created for itself internally? Who could tell? Possibly there was no way of ever knowing.
“But somehow, what Nixie is doing is the obverse,” Shilohin went on. “She is managing to bypass VISAR’s sensory channels. She’s interacting directly with its inner data representations. The result is that VISAR, for the first time, is able to assimilate human perceptual constructs. It’s seeing the universe of space, time, and motion for the first time, instead of simply manipulating symbols. It must be quite an experience.”
“Obviously,” Hunt commented dryly.
Danchekker’s brow was still furrowed. “But how?” he demanded. “How could such a thing be possible?”
“At this stage I don’t know,” Shilohin confessed. “All I can say is that at some deep level, Nixie’s mind operates in a manner radically different from ours. And yet, at the higher levels associated with the senses and closer to consciousness, it must be virtually the same as any other human’s-otherwise VISAR wouldn’t be able to interface to them. I don’t have an explanation. It’s almost as if it were a mixture of two minds, one human, and the other-I don’t know. In some ways it’s as if she were a conscious extension of the machine itself… utterly unlike anything we’ve ever come across before.”
Danchekker looked at Hunt. “Yet she admits that in every other aspect she has no intuitive aptitude at all for what we would consider to be the most elementary scientific principles. What do you make of it?”
Hunt spread his hands helplessly and shook his head.
Danchekker turned his gaze back to Nixie, who was lounging at ease, chin resting on her hand and one finger stretched along the side of her face, following the conversation with interest. “Do you have any picture in your mind of what goes on inside VISAR?” he asked her. “Can you describe it in any terms at all?”
“Not really,” Nixie replied, speaking via ZORAC. “I just know what to do. I can’t explain how.”
“No more than a child could explain the physics of swimming or riding a bicycle,” Hunt said. “She just feels it instinctively.”
“How long have you had this ability?” Danchekker asked.
“I’ve always had it,” Nixie answered.
Danchekker looked askance. “But that’s wrong, surely. Isn’t it something that a person of your kind acquires suddenly, after the abrupt transformation of personality that we’ve heard about?”
“You still don’t understand,” Nixie said. “Everyone where I come from has it. They’re born that way. It’s people like you who don’t have it.”