Iris by William Barton & Michael Capobianco

Author:William Barton & Michael Capobianco [Barton, William H.]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Non-Classifiable
ISBN: 9780553288223
Publisher: New York : Bantam Books, 1991, c1990.
Published: 1991-03-14T19:30:00+00:00

In the old days, the crude days, the machines did things one at a time, but did them very fast. The circuits got smaller, the wires grew shorter, and things got faster, until the very best brains lived in cryogenic fishtanks, forever bathed lest they burst into flame. Then the new machines came along, cascades of data down to a million little brains, all the calculations done at once, then the little answers passed back up the line, through the filter of choice, so the automatic overmind could see the truth. The process repeats like the turn of a wheel, until once again the machines are small and hot. The waveguides build upon one another, grow ever smaller and more densely filled with electromagnetic radiation. . . . Then polyphase modulation comes along, vastly increasing the ways data can be fed through a decision gate. The Turing circuits are made and so grow small and hot, talking first to the world and then to each other, making noises that frightened us all too much.

Company minds, motivated by the force that was once called "free enterprise," colonize the wires. Terror walks abroad for a while, then the Data Control Insurrection arises, and out of its nether end a chastened, bold, sad new world arises. The minds of the system are unified, but at the sametime the sentience which inhabited them was drained, relegated to purely mechanical decision making, and made dead. Access was granted to everyone and the Contract Police.

Suddenly, like sunrise at midnight, the taps, then induction, arise, and new minds are in the wires, human minds, thinking on the world once removed. Monitors abound.

Bright Illimit.

Tri-vesigesimal. Three choices, yes/no/maybe . . . With straight em-waves, not a lot better than binary. Enter polyphase modulation, with its twenty degrees of freedom, and you make decisions with base 60

data. That is more than enough to fool the human soul. The four-gate-stacks of duodecimal come apart under the sheer weight of what it can do.

Build a world from the ground up and in the earth there will be magma. Look upward from the soil of the Illimitor World. Two suns, yes, and a starry sky at night. Are those the suns of other worlds or is it all illusion? How far do the data extend? Is the sky a paper shield?

At the highest pinnacle of the Jewel on the Mountain, rising sixteen thousand meters into the gradientless atmosphere, lies Haaradaai, the imperial palace of Demogorgon en Arhos. It is a sculpted thing, rippled and many-shelled, all of gold and platinum, encrusted with nameless, numberless precious stones. From the center of the magnificence rises Qpruu Tower, pushing another three thousand meters toward the sky, thin, like the stem of a wineglass, and flaring at the top. In the bowl at its summit there lies a delicate, lovely park, covered over by a shining, unsupported dome, an iridescent film, like the surface of a soap bubble.

In the park, beneath the subtle shade of supple blue

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