The Noachian ’Sembly used a gravitational whip around the black hole to escape pursuit. This cost lives and baked their ships until they could barely limp on to a marginally habitable world, named Isis by some other ’Sembly, which a millennium before had departed for greener planets, farther out from True Center. Isis was dry and windswept, but apparently of little interest to mechs. This was enough; the Noachians spiraled in and began to live again. But much had happened on the way.
Mech weaponry can be insidious, particularly their biological tricks. A ’Sembly platitude was all too true. You may get better after getting hit, but you do not get well.
A year into their voyage, Ahmihi lay dying. As he gasped hideously, lungs slowly eaten by the nano-seekers the mechs had carried, his wife came near to say goodbye. The ’Sembly folk were afraid to record Ahmihi’s personality into an Aspect, since he was plainly mech-damaged, perhaps mentally. In his fever he spoke of some bargain he had struck with the near-mythical Mantis, and no one could fathom the terms. He had been tampered with in some profound way, perhaps so that the story he told could give away nothing vital.
But they did have his archived recording from the year before; not everything would be lost. In a desperate era, skills and knowledge had to be preserved into the chips which rode at the nape of the neck of each ’Sembly member. These carried the legacy of many ancient personalities, rendered into Aspects or the lesser Faces or Profiles. Ahmihi would survive in fractional form, his expertise available to his descendants.
No one noticed when a small insectlike entity crawled from the dying Ahmihi’s mouth. It whirred softly toward his wife, Jalia, and stung her. She slapped it away, thinking it no different from the other vermin released from the hydro sections.
The flier implanted in Jalia a packet of nanodevices that quickly recoded one of her ova. Then it dissolved to avoid detection. The Noachian ’Sembly burned Ahmihi’s body to prevent any possible desecration by mechs, especially if nanos were alive in the ship.
Their prayers were answered; apparently the small band of fleeing humans were not worth mech time or effort to pursue.
Jalia gave birth to a son, a treasure in an era when human numbers were falling. Gene scanners found nothing out of the ordinary. She called the boy Paris, in the tradition of the Noachian ’Sembly, to use city names from Earth—Akron, Kiev, Fairhope—though Earth itself was now a mere legend, doubted by many.
When he was five his intensive education began. He had been an ordinary boy until then, playing happily in the dry fields from which skimpy crops came. He was wiry, athletic, and seldom spoke.
When Paris began learning, he made a discovery. Others did not sense the world as he did.
Every second, many millions of bits of information flooded through his senses. But he could consciously discern only about forty bits per second of this cataract. He could read documents faster than he could write, or than people could speak, but the stream was still torpid.
Whether the information was going in or out, his body was designed for roughly the same torpid flow speed. All serial ways of taking in information were painfully sluggish. His awareness was like a spotlight gliding across a darkened stage, lighting an actor’s face dramatically, leaving all else in the blackness. Consciousness stood on a mountain of discarded information.
Even thinking about this fact was slow. It took him much longer to explain to himself what he was thinking than it did to think it. His brain channeled ten billion bits per second, far more than he took in from his surroundings.
There were as many incoming signals from his sensorium as there were outgoing commands to his body. But nearly none of this could he tell anyone about. His sensibility, his speech—all were hopelessly serial logjams. Everybody else was the same; humans were not alone in their serial solitude.
He had already learned how important story was to them—and to him. Plots, heroes and villains, for and against, minor roles and major ones, action and wisdom, tension and release—as fundamental as the human linear mouth-gut-anus tube, for story was the key to mental digestion.
And without knowing it, each of them told their own stories, in every moment. Their bodies gave them away with myriad expressions, grunts, shrugs, unconscious gestures. Big chunks of their personalities came through outside their conscious control, as the unconscious spoke for itself through the body, a speech unheard by the discerning driver, hidden from it.
For a young boy this was a shock. Others knew more about him than he knew about himself. By sensing the megabits that leaked through the body, they could read him.
This was enormously embarrassing. Such a silent language must have come early in human evolution, Paris guessed, when it was more vital to know what strangers meant than what they said, using some crude proto-language.
And laughter—the wine of speech, he learned—was the consciousness’s admission of its own paucity. He laughed often, after realizing that.
Soon, even while scampering in madcap joy over the hard-packed dirt of the playground, he felt a part of him stand apart. What he experienced—all those billions of bits per second—was a simulation of what he sensed. This he felt as a gut level truth.
Worse, the simulation lagged half a second behind the world outside. He tested this by seeing how fast his body reacted to pain or pleasure. Sure enough, he jerked away from a needle before he consciously knew it was poking him in the calf.
His sensorium was ripe with tricks. His vision had a blind spot, which he deduced must emerge from the site where nerves entered the back of the eye. An abandoned, ruined Chandelier seemed larger when it hung in its forlorn orbit just above the Isis horizon than when it arched high in the sky. When he ran across the crinkled plains and stopped to admire filmy clouds overhead, his eyes told him for a while that the clouds were rushing by—a kinesthetic memory of running, translated by his mind into an observed fact.
All because evolution shaped the eye-brain system to regard things high up as farther away, more unattainable, and so made people perceive them as smaller. And retained the sensation of running, unable to discard the mind’s pattern-frame right away.
He sat in class and regarded his giggling classmates. How odd they seemed. Understanding himself had helped in dealing with them. He was popular, with a natural manner that some mistook for leadership. It was something decidedly different, something never seen in human society before. He felt this but could not name it. Indeed, there was no word.
Gradually Paris saw that their—and his—world was meaning-filled, before they became aware of it. Scents, rubs, flavors—all carried the freight of origins many millennia and countless light-years away.
So he came to make his next discovery: the unconscious ruled. He learned this when he noticed that he was happiest when he was not in control—when consciousness did not command. Ecstasy, joy, even simple gladness—these were the fruit of acting without thinking.
“I am more than my I,” he said wonderingly. “I am my Me.”
When his work went well—and everyone worked, even children—his Me was engaged. When things went well, they just went, zinging along. He ran ’factoring ’bots, tilled fields, prepared spicy meals—all in the flow, immersed.
Even when he used his Faces or Profiles for craft labors, he could manifest their outlined selves without conscious management. These ancient sliced segments of real people used some of his perception-processing space, so that when working he lost Isis’s crisp savannah scent, wind-whispers, and prickly rubs. The Faces particularly needed to siphon off these sensory stimuli, to prevent them from becoming husklike embodiments, mere arid digital textbooks. He could feel them sitting behind his eyes, eagerly supping snippets of the world, relishing in scattershot cries. As he slept, he enabled them to raise his eyelids and catch glimpses that fed them gratifying slivers. Listening through his eardrums, they could keep watch—a safety precaution. Of such thin gruel they made their experience. This also isolated him, ensuring deep sleep.