literature

Mind Games, part Twenty I'm putting you str Eight

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Mind Games part Tw e're going to set you enty str Eight

The dwarf appeared on the sand, walking from the direction of the Observatory under the inevitable umbrella. Judging by that perpetual sour puss expression he always wore he'd probably come to complain about the barbeque smoke that was, even now, being blown in the opposite direction. I took that as our 'get up and go' signal, so we got up and went.

Just in case I'd forgotten how many doctors I'd met over the last day or so, they were all there to greet me in the Observatory entrance hall, standing together in a body large enough to obscure the Ordinary near the base of the stairs. I'd often wondered what might be hidden up there, but it seemed to be mainly the observation 'deck' of Surveillance and Control so I hadn't been THAT anxious to re-explore it. I'd been taken THERE before.

There was Dr Mentz, Dr Carrington, Professor Dr Markram, Dr Tom Rankin, Professor Doctor Karl Young and a new Doctor. Who could this be, I wondered. Professor Dr Lamont introduced us. "Martin, this is Doctor Ben Wei of the University of Beijing, in the People's Republic of China. He is Professor of Cold War history; and an expert in the mind control techniques used by totalitarian regimes." That's rich! I thought to myself. He also turned out to be another fully qualified head inspector. If they wanted two present, did that mean that they were going to 'section' me if I didn't react well to what I was surely about to be told? Dr Wei's face tipped forward like that of a buff coloured granite Buddha slowly starting to roll downhill. "I am most honoured to meet you, Mr Carter," he said. He sounded sincere, but with that stone face that the wiser Chinese had always cultivated, how would I know? Seven Doctors and a snow white dwarf! And here I was thinking that I'd already seen it all, before this.

Dr Mentz showed us all into the small study to his right. We were two to a wall and we didn't know where to start. Each one was covered with what looked like old London telephone directories stacked on shelves which reached from floor to ceiling. "You cannot really appreciate what 'being set back' IS, unless you can see what you ARE, for yourself." he told me, not for the first time, I suspected.

"When you first came here you said you that you were not a number. WE are not numbers, except in VR, Mr Carter. YOU, on the other hand, ARE a number; and we've simulated what that would look like, digit by digit, converted from binary to decimal form, in THESE books." My mind boggled. If it hadn't done so before it had definitely done so when I realised just how long and gigantic that 'number' really was. It was nothing less than a decimal translation of my Universal Turing Machine program number. Since this very kind of number is involved in the so called 'Halting Problem' uncomputability theorem I was, naturally, familiar with it as a concept because of the similarity between that and Cantor's 'Diagonal' argument from number theory, especially as pertaining to the 'transfinite' numbers, towards the mathematically provable existence of the so called 'higher infinities'. Think about it. Absolutely every single time that you construct an isosceles right triangle, something irrational happens. It never fails!

Dr Mentz was young and good looking, not in a Sidney Poitier way; but he had his own air of patrician intelligence. He was always conservatively dressed, even in casual wear. He pointed to a book with a large 'A' printed at the top of its spine, the first of a very large number of volumes that much more than filled the top shelf behind him, and at the corresponding book with the last of the many 'Z's,  not quite at the end of the fourth shelf down on the wall at right angles to that. Sweeping his arm around to point in turn at all four walls of the study, and in a voice that really did sound a lot like Lawrence Fishburne's, he said, "THIS is your number, printed out in the same size type used for a standard telephone book. Re-loaded into the cores of your 'platform', shall we call it, and set running...."

"It would BE me, starting at some time in the past, if you gave it the chance?", I asked, already knowing the answer.

"That's exactly it, Martin. THAT is the operating system, settings, programs, and most importantly ALL recordable CNS parameters; of which there are many, embedded in it as large tables. It was taken like a snapshot, you might say, of your virtual brain; all of it..... as closely as possible to the last time on which we were able to made a back-up copy which we could certify", Dr Mentz looked at all of the other six doctors, "as SANE!" Bloody Hell, I thought, this was a printed version of my super multiple, parallel core dumps plus ALL the WRRAM storage then on line to them; recorded at some time when they could, according to their own experts, still trust me to be me without trying to destroy something or kill myself.

I hadn't been asleep during Professor Markram's lecture to the Groom Lake Facility faculty members. I already knew about his 'Blue Brain' work from things I'd seen on the censored and back dated, historically time compressed news, media events and features published over the internet from behind my firewall. The time line that was implied by everything I saw had indicated that my life in The Village had lasted from late in 1975 to about the turn of the century. In MY history the World Trade Center had still been attacked, but in 1990. All Dr Henry Markram's work had been done before the end of the century instead of after it and so on, and so on.

I reached for a book at random from the shelf directly behind me and sat down. Apart from the book shelves the room held four triple seat sofas each with a large, square, coffee table in front of it, of which there was only one. On it were four wide flat screens fencing in a central micro tower with a built in 100TB hard drive. As I flipped the hundreds of large pages and stared at columns and rows and blocks of decimal digits, it reminded me of the old RAND corporation's specially compiled random number tables. But it was not random. I kept seeing repeats of quite long sequences and places where the 'texture' of the blocks changed because there were more or fewer of some number like 0 or 1. Translated into hexadecimal this would be identical to a typical IBM core dump from the olden times only in decimal and with more rows and columns of blocks and no symbols translated into 'plain text'.


Professor Young sat to my left and Professor Lamont and Trank sat opposite us. Dr Mentz and Henry were to our left on the next sofa and Tiffany and the New Dr Wei sat opposite them. Without further ado Trank did something which made the home page of someone's internet art sharing website glow on the screens. It had some deviant name or other which would deter all but the bravest children from clicking on it, and many adults also; but it was, when I had first been shown it in some other life, the largest such site in both membership numbers and the sheer quantity of work hosted, both text and imagery, on the planet. Whoever the photographer or artist was he had a good camera, an eye for detail and composition and either took pictures every day at some fabulous rate or had been at it a very long time.

Now, I'd taken thousands of slides and hundreds of prints during what I remembered as having been my early life, but I'd never had a digital camera and certainly not here. They would never have let me post photos of this place on the WWW, anyway.  All that notwithstanding, Dr Mentz told us all, with a straight face, that while the image bank and texts were available to the public the true identity of the user name 'aegiandyad' was one of the most heavily guarded, highly classified official secrets there was on BOTH sides of the Atlantic. The site was so open and transparent that, after a while, I began to detect clues that were disturbing. The photographer was like me, but, as the 'handle' implied, he was with someone he kept calling Mrs a* on their site; and I've never been legally married.
At last, he gets to know who and what he is; but only if his mentors are telling the truth.
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