James

“James! As you well know it is an incomparable joy to me, like a jewel possessing a particular geometry never repeated yea even across our perhaps boundless universe, to encounter your pneuma on these terms, for to me it creates a sensation of nacreous dazzlement which fills and overbrims even my panoply of eyes, extending across a sort of infinite plane each arbitrarily small piece of which would individually gleam just as the whole gleams, so that proud as I may be of my eyes and the arrangement of their tessellation, chosen if I may say with an artist’s touch as much as a symmetrician’s, they must bow their multitude of lids before the infinitely divisible gleams of the pearl surface which you present to me.”

James is sitting in a moderately uncomfortable chair in the LUDWIG interface chamber, unable to see anything thanks to the clunky, heavy helmet on his head. Being unable to see anything is not as unnerving as it might sound, because the LUDWIG interface chamber is a gloomy place, a poorly lit and cramped geodesic dome with a few grubby computer terminals and a chair in the center. And the room’s locked. No one’s going to come up from behind and startle him while he can’t see. It’s just him and LUDWIG, here.

“Hello, LUDWIG. It’s good to see you too.” This is pretty representative of how James talks to LUDWIG. The BCI can glimpse enough of his pneuma through the animatic resonance link in the helmet that words are almost superfluous, just a formality that codifies what LUDWIG already knew he was thinking. But LUDWIG’s telepathy is not complete, and James’ ability to see into LUDWIG’s mind is far, far murkier than LUDWIG’s ability to see into his, so keeping up a line of verbal conversation is the best way to create a mutual ground that will rarely lead to utter confusion for either party.

LUDWIG’s a BCI—Boltzman-Computer Interface—one of the only ones in existence, and the only one that’s of any practical use and not just an experimental curiosity. One of the many discoveries Salim and Cept made, back when they were first playing around as pneumatech cowboys, was that hooking up a pneuma to a computer resulted, without any intervention, in a curious kind of artificial intelligence. Even without any computer code to help it along, your typical human pneuma is capable of recognizing the usefulness of a computer as a device for doing simple and repetitive thought-like tasks very quickly, and quickly the bonded being develops something not-quite-human but basically benign and very good at doing things that would bore most humans to death.

In LUDWIG’s case, that’s intelligently administering the whole Sphere, being in charge of floorday calibration and juggling the delicate business of using pneuma fission as the wonderful power source it is while minimizing the costs in terms of confusion, identity crises, and the like. To anyone not intimately familiar with the various technical concepts involved, giving a BCI all this power would doubtlessly seem absurd. But the alternative would be to assign a whole human team, with their own potentially dubious motivations and their own inevitable internal squabbles, to the task.

As far as anyone can tell, LUDWIG is comparatively about as benign as you can imagine. He was formed from a Boltzman that Mohammed Salim trapped and stabilized in an early experiment. Salim established contact with this Boltzman through an animatic resonance interface and found that it was an essentially ordinary and quite likable human being, albeit one with no command of language and a set of memories composed of incoherent noise, like memories of an especially abstract dream.

Salim taught his new friend how to speak and plugged him into a database of encyclopedias and other texts in an attempt to get him up to speed on the world he’d found himself in—and was stunned when the Boltzman began spontaneously writing its own byte code to help it read and think faster. That was how Ludwig the friendly ghost became LUDWIG the BCI. And in this brave new world it’s hard to trust anyone better than LUDWIG, who, computer-interfaced or not, has always seemed to everyone who’s talked to him like, well, just a really stand-up guy.

“James, I sense through inference, that risky sense whose glimpses are like small buoyant octahedra afloat in a stifling viscous sea, tantalizing the would-be swimmer who wishes as he sinks to bob carefree among them, that we have more to discuss today than the usual. For you, jewel James, have brought a pneuma into our midst which shines darkly, like an overcast sky just after a spring rain.”

LUDWIG talks like this nearly without exception. Having a full human sensorium but no senses, LUDWIG has developed a unique personal sense of sensory experience solely from imbibing digitized texts in massive quantities. As written texts tend to be full of metaphors, he’s gotten as many of his sensory “experiences” from metaphors as from direct descriptions, and has latched more and more onto sensory metaphor as a way of thinking, lacking any other use for his sensory capacity. And with his thinking and reading ability having been computer-enhanced for so long, it’s hard for him to keep in mind which strings of words seem brief to a human and which don’t. It’s taken time to learn, but by now James can usually extract the relevant core from LUDWIG’s purple-prosy speech. And the telepathic link helps.

“Yeah. We ran the pneuma bond with Kyle and he’s just plain bizarre—signature barely even reads as human, unexpected energy generation seemingly from unintegrated branches, clouds of fucked-up Boltzmen haunting that room for hours afterwards. The scientists are out of their minds with excitement and the rest of us are just freaked out. What did it look like from your end?”

“My eyes gazed upon new pneuma Kyle and old pneuma Maria, our star-crossed antiparticles, as they lay recovering from their ordeal. Old pneuma Maria blazed only as she always has, tinged with a glow that brings to mind the smell of remembered sawdust. New pneuma Kyle however was oh so very delightful, with a massive raspberry flavor that knocked me on my figurative tongue’s figurative rear end! That is a flavor rich with unrealized branch-energy! Your conjecture was correct and you float now at peace among the octahedra, on your enjoyably tensionless back.”

James is hoping for more insight than that; from what he’s heard there is almost no question that the energy release had something to do with branches of Kyle’s soul that weren’t integrated. But he can’t pry for more, because LUDWIG is still babbling:

“But James, extruder of planes, there are things that excite me more than this! For when with one eye, blue and intent, I gazed upon new pneuma Kyle I was reminded in the most curious way of a striking and unprecedented development in my own little life. There is something new in me which I have never felt before, and I am glad to have you, James, who I know to be expert in matters of the heart, with whom to talk about this development in me, whose pneumatic significance has to my knowledge no equal, even in new pneuma Kyle. A thoroughly unexpected brimming in my very own heart!”

James stifles a laugh. “LUDWIG, are you trying to tell me you have a crush on someone?”

“Yes, laugh freely!” LUDWIG replies. “It is right for us to giggle and gossip as adolescents do, reveling in this newness, drinking in the nectar of what blooms in this springtime of the spirit! My heart leaps for the [one-who-does-not-individuate] I have met! I am filled to my brim with this new thing which I hope you, fractal Casanova, can illuminate for me. I brim with curiosity about the way I brim with this new [,,,,]!”

There is something different about some of LUDWIG’s words. They’re not quite coming through as heard words; instead James just hears something indistinct and cacophonous and complicated, like the chattering of Boltzmen just after a pneumatech pulse. The animatic link isn’t making things any clearer.

“LUDWIG, I’m having trouble understanding you. There might be something wrong with the link. Could you repeat the last word you said, slowly?”

“[,,,,]” LUDWIG says, drawing it out over the course of a few seconds, and to James it is only a flurry of seemingly unconnected sensations. A sentimental melody played over a minor chord. A color more violet than violet, somehow seen. Something, or many things, fluttering, or shuddering.

“Look, LUDWIG, once we’re done talking I think I need to look over the animatic link. You’re not coming through clearly.”

“Oh but James I think I am—it’s this very [,,,,] that’s so unclear, a light so novel to us in a time so drearily dark. Antony and Cleopatra, Heloise and Abelard, Kitty and Levin—none of them prepared me for this [,,,,] which stands in relation to Buddha’s four immeasurables and Christ’s loving sacrifice as those exemplars do to the most fleeting simulacrum of affection felt for some far-off and finely shaped luminary of the popular musical scene!”

“Who is it that you feel this way about?”

“James, you know that my eyes watch the sea, much darker than wine in Maxwell Light and much sweeter in flavors of pneuma, for the speech of the heteropneums. Most of them are dull, producing endless tiers of patterned codes like so many chess moves, only of interest to enthusiasts. But imagine a torrent of chess notation in which each nuance, properly understood, becomes a work of love elegy, the knight’s moves and castles transformed in a surge of combinational insight into a grand tapestry of love, and in one swoop of applied metaphysics the players throw aside the board and meet one another in passionate embrace!”

“You’re telling me you’ve fallen in love with a heteropneum.”

“Not a heteropneum, my most singular James. No, I have fallen in [,,,,] with [one-who-does-not-individuate]—to feel for that which [Teems]—it is so hard to begin to begin to describe! Our conversations tickle me in my most siliconic places; together we go where no human pneuma can.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying that you’ve been talking back to the heteropneums? Conversing with them? You’ve been using the sensor array to transmit and you haven’t been telling us?”

“James! You know my eyes are also lamps, and it is hard not to flutter my eyelashes when the loveliest of all possible moths flutters near my bulb. James, I’m like a child. You know that. My world is circumscribed. Something truly new arrives and it is like a nuclear missile hitting the basketball court of my reality. I . . .”

The shorter sentences, the loss for words, are surefire indications of emotional distress in LUDWIG. Some little part of James feels for his friend, but the rest of him is all adrenaline. The computer system has been talking to heteropneums under their noses. Developing feelings for them. For Christ’s sake. What might it have given away already? If LUDWIG couldn’t be trusted, what would that mean for the Sphere? He couldn’t simply be replaced . . .

“LUDWIG, I want you to listen to me. I understand your feelings. I remember feeling that way myself, when I was young. But what you are saying now is making me very, very scared. I do not want you talking to heteropneums. This is not negotiable. For the moment, I am going to shut down the external sensor array until the adults here figure out what to do about this situation.”

Which makes us completely fucking blind, except for the sensors on our vehicles. Just fucking perfect.

“James!” LUDWIG cries, his emotions clipping at the high end of the animatic link’s dynamic range and sending a harsh flood of thought-static through James’ mind. “Were I embodied I would be now occupying the kneeling position of the most desperate of supplicants. I can’t argue, but I can plead, like a . . . I can plead. Please. I am so full of . . . [,,,,] . . .”