Ratio

Ratio Tile wakes up screaming.

His bed is sideways. Ratio’s bed has never been sideways before. The accelerometer in his inner ear is screaming gibberish at him. He spends a good fifteen seconds negotiating the subtleties of the to-vomit-or-not-to-vomit question. Finally, stomach contents thankfully unchucked, he sits up and looks around.

The room is, in fact, neither sideways nor moving. Had he had some kind of vestibular-themed nightmare? He remembers that he’d gone back to bed after—after the Sphere started levitating—and curled up in Jorge’s waiting arms and hid from the world. Had refused to say anything. So the nightmare theory is probably not as plausible as either levitation-related turbulence or some sickness of the soul (and Ratio’s soul sure is sick) leading psychosomatically to a sickness of the stomach—

“Ratio. You’re up.”

Ratio turns. Jorge’s awake next to him, scrolling through something on his laptop.

“Yeah. I’m . . . awake. At least.”

“Well, you’re talking now. That’s a start.”

Ratio sighs. “Yes. I’m talking. I shouldn’t be allowed to talk, because whenever I have one of my great ideas and end up expressing that idea it ends up blowing something up or I dunno making someone glow and start talking like a creepy child from a horror movie but yes sure here I am saying words. Are you happy?”

Jorge does not respond. Ratio chastises himself for the outburst, then chastises himself for chastising himself because chastising himself doesn’t actually accomplish anything. This starts up an infinite series which Ratio decides to treat as geometric and thus summable, the infinite pile of successively diminishing rebukes adding up to a finite sense of self-loathing about twice as intense as the one he had felt a moment ago. He runs a hand through his hair, grabs a clump of curls between two fingers, applies intense pressure. The resulting sense of release diminishes his self-loathing by about 0.01%.

It’s not good and there’s no way it’s going to get better and here it is.

Excise the next minute from the record, please. It contains nothing worth preserving.

Then, finally:

“You know, we crashed,” Jorge says casually, as if commenting on a mildly interesting story in the morning’s newspaper.

“What?”

“The Sphere. It crashed on top of some sort of giant metal dome. There’s a city inside. We declared war on them, or something? Right before we crashed. And then everything started glowing and an army of little kids arrived and fought aliens or someth—”

“What?”

“Here, it’s all in the public logs. The sensor array’s back on.” Jorge gestures at his laptop.

Ratio’s eyes widen.

“Want a look?” Jorge wears an expression Ratio knows well—the “I dare you to find this boring” face.

In joyous defeat, Ratio nods. The laptop is handed over.

Ratio grabs some sensor data, logs on to the Sphere’s high performance computer cluster, and runs some visualizations. What he sees sends chills down his spine.

Branch-loops everywhere. Not just the ordinary ones he and Cecelia had predicted, but a whole range of exotic higher-order varieties. Framing them, all around, a backdrop of insanely intricate soul coherence activity, bits of pneuma shunted here and there by some man-made system of labyrinthine complexity.

Gradually but steadily, the branch-loops are overtaking everything else. It is as if the entire city around them is being converted into a giant heteropneum.

Ratio wants to understand. This is good. This means a distraction from guilt and self-hatred. Build nothing, destroy nothing, cause nothing. Just understand.

This will be a difficult day. This will be a Tales From Topographic Oceans day.

After obtaining Jorge’s consent, Ratio cues up the album. It is an album he feels protective towards—“self-indulgent” and “overly ambitious,” they called it, but who ever got anywhere without some self-indulgence and ambition?—and he saves it for special occasions. And this occasion pretty much defines “special.”

•

Hours pass.

Ratio makes no progress.

Tales From Topographic Oceans concludes.

“It’s the fucking interaction effects!” Ratio shouts out of nowhere. Jorge, who’s been lying in bed waiting for the world to right itself, stares at him.

“If it were just one of these things—the new branch-loops, the pneumatic weapons, the structured radiation seeping out of the ground, the city infrastructure, the souls that keep altering their physics-bindings—if it were just one new thing I could understand it. But you can’t separate them! They all interact!”

Jorge looks at him, and there’s that face again.

“Ratio, we both know there’s a way to make yourself smarter.”

“Wait, you don’t mean . . . that’s against EPRN regulations . . .”

“The bosses have all left. I’m sure if you go see LUDWIG’s operator he’ll help you set it up.”

“But—I might never be the same. I might never be me again. Would you really let me . . . ?”

“Ratio, nothing is going to be the same. Everything is completely FUBAR by this point. And if there’s anyone who can make sense of what’s happening, it’s you.”

They kiss, a long heavy kiss, and then Ratio leaves, wordlessly, off in search of a man who will turn him into a machine.

•

The man isn’t hard to find. Ratio knows where the LUDWIG interface chamber is, although he’s never used it himself, and when he knocks on the door—his card won’t get him in—James answers the knock.

“Hey,” James says with a nod. It’s the understated greeting of a survivalist after the apocalypse, carrying an unmissable undercurrent of I see you’re still alive.

“Hey,” Ratio says. “I want to be like LUDWIG.”

James stares. “Like LUDWIG.”

“You know. A BCI. Or whatever you call it when the person’s not a Boltzman.”

“I thought EPRN was against scientists doing that.”

“They are. Or were. But I don’t think there was ever a legitimate reason. I think they just didn’t want us figuring out anything we weren’t supposed to. Couldn’t let us get too smart.”

“Well,” James says, “I can definitely give it a try. I’ll just be following the procedure set out in the report on the LUDWIG experiment. No guarantees it’ll work, given that you aren’t a Boltzman. And absolutely no guarantee of any kind of safety.”

“I find it hard to care about safety at this point.”

James nods in agreement.

That was easy, Ratio thinks. He is beginning to like James. He makes a mental note to get to know him—if he survives the procedure. If any of them survive whatever is raging outside.

•

Thirty minutes later, Ratio is sitting at a table in a white room, and has been told that his soul is now “in two-way contact with a limited-rewrite code space.”

He doesn’t feel any different.

“I don’t feel any different,” he says. James shrugs.

Idly, Ratio thinks back to the morning, to his time in bed with Jorge. Maybe he can just give up on understanding—what good has his drive to understand ever done anyone, really? Maybe he can just go back to his boyfriend. Go back and do more than just kiss. If he is a failure as a mind perhaps he is just meant to be a body.

Ratio stands up, intending to leave the room. At once he notices something odd. He can still see a vivid image of his room, and Jorge, in his mind. He has stopped thinking about them, and yet they are still there, in parallel with the room in front of him.

Time to experiment. Ratio envisions a flower, sprouting from a clay flowerpot. It hangs in his mind’s eye, and yet the image of his room, and a topless Jorge, persist in his . . . other mind’s eye.

Ratio makes up a twenty-digit number. He recites it from memory. He recites it again. He recites it backwards.

He thinks of ten different images, and sees them all at once.

He envisions an abstract cube, represented in his inner space as a collection of blue lines set against a blackboard-like background. He rotates the cube. He envisions the cube extending along a fourth, orthogonal direction, gaining a new kind of width exactly analogous to its three other widths . . .

There is a sense of effort. He feels as though he is manipulating some delicate object with a ghostly appendage not located anywhere in his physical body. A tower of abstractions piles up under his deft grasp. The cube flickers out of existence, and a tesseract explodes into the view of his four-dimensional imagination.

James is staring at him. He realizes that he’s been standing in place for several minutes.

“This is amazing,” he says. “Can I connect to the sensor array?”

“Sure,” James says, and begins to type.

•

Across fifteen distinct sensory modalities, chaos blooms in Ratio’s inner space. Souls twine around one another in abstract configuration space, forming regular patterns like crop circles. Every few seconds, an explosion sends his sense of direction reeling and releases Boltzmen around which neighboring souls course in dizzying spirals.

This is not understanding—this is overwhelming.

But there is a place where things make sense. A place beneath, where there are no maddening circles, and only a soothing hum, a civilized noise, inviting him in from the storm, offering him tea and a hearty meal . . .

Ratio’s mind fixes upon the weak data stream continually radiating from the streets of the New City’s ground level, and plunges into its depths. Structured information falls into place before him, and he spawns theory-making programs, mini-Ratios, to make sense of them. Insights descend at a rate of hundreds per second. The language of the earth becomes intelligible.

The earth is telling him that beneath it is a highly structured set of pneumatic processes. A computation of some kind. Mostly the ground simply glows with Pneuma Heat—computational waste products—but at regularly spaced intervals, there is something else. A message. The mini-Ratios busy themselves in speculation as to what this message might say, if designed to be relatively efficient and universally comprehensible. They happily return with a full report:

This is the goddess Magna Mater Miranda. Guest access is available upon consent to probe ghost scan.

Miranda? That isn’t a very common name. Ratio shelves the thought; there are other things to attend to.

Ratio assents to the computer’s request, and then he is beneath the earth, flowing freely through the myriad tiers of a massive mind’s self-contained ontology.

He pulls back and commands the sensor array to focus on the thing underground. He sees miles of land packed with transistors, splitting and reintegrating in an orderly circulation, computing in multiversal parallel and artfully shunting waste heat into non-functional receptacle branches. Through other eyes he sees neuromorphic architecture that builds feature-detectors of higher and higher order. He ascends the hierarchy, through objects to abstractions to something else which he cannot name.

A mini-Ratio cries out for attention. There is a profound regularity here, it says. The system’s architecture is almost self-contained, all references leading to other parts of the system or to its many sensory instruments throughout the city. But again and again, there are references to one communication port which cannot be found, and seems to be inactive. It must be important. It is referred to everywhere, as though it were much more important than a mere sensory organ.

Almost simultaneously, several things occur to Ratio in quick succession.

The first is that this computer is functioning far from its design specs. It is a thing built from the bottom up on the assumptions of soul coherence theory, a sort of Ceptopia. But the events occurring above ground are far from the soul coherence regime. Already Ratio can see components straining, failing, computations fizzling. If the system’s design were not ingeniously robust, it would be completely non-functional by now.

The second thing Ratio realizes is that this is exploitable.

There is no centralized control system in the machine: it relies on a kind of decentralized system of authenticity, in which individual components provide evidence that they have not been tampered with to their neighbors. The components near ground level, battered by loopy Boltzmen, can no longer present such evidence and have been disowned by the machine’s internal culture. But if Ratio sends just the right set of signals, he can fake authenticity—produce signals that could only come from inside the machine under normal circumstances.

The third thing Ratio realizes is that if he does so, he has no idea what will happen. This is the largest computer in existence, as far as he knows, and he is about to compromise it. Maybe this will shut off some sort of life support and kill everyone in the city. Maybe it will . . .

But Ratio knows—and this is the fourth and last thing he realizes—he knows that he fundamentally does not care.

He wants to understand this machine more than he wants anything else on earth, right now. And the drive to understand, for better or for worse, is the beginning and end of his ethics. He is Ratio Tile, and he is playing his assigned role as demon of pure curiosity. The multiverse has made him, and the multiverse must suffer the consequences.

An army of mini-Ratios constructs a fake signal. It is a work of fucking art. The goddess Magna Mater Miranda has no idea what hit her. And Ratio Tile spreads throughout the system, observing all.

He sees a million lines converging on one point. On that mysterious communication port. Ratio wills the port to open, and it does.

Through the portal, he sees his boss.

Miranda stands in a barren room, looking down at a wooden table on which sits a typewriter and a thick stack of paper. She looks up, and her eyes open wide.

“Who are you? Are you Martin?”

“My name is Ratio. Are you . . . Miranda?”

“Not quite. I prefer to be called Amanda, these days.”

Ratio has no idea what is going on.

“Who are you, then?”

“I am the core of the New City’s mother goddess and ruler. In my full role I am known as Magna Mater Miranda. Are you with Martin? Are you one of the Salimists?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Ratio says truthfully. “I have worked for Martin, or been used by him. But I don’t mean you harm. I just want to understand what is going on.”

“I can tell you,” Amanda says, glee playing across her face, “but you’ll have to give me admin access. Which it seems you have.”

“I can do that,” Ratio says, glee building in his heart, wherever exactly that is, now that he’s as much machine as man. “But I have things to ask of you, too. Can you ensure my friends are safe?”

“I can bring you and your friends to my Babblibrary beneath the earth. We will be safe here. Tell me who you want me to bring, and I’ll do it. Just give me admin.”

“Deal.”