The Golden Age by John C. Wright

Author:John C. Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

2.

(For a moment, she stared in confusion, not remembering that the large, muscular hands gripping the pastel diary were her own. His own … ? Phaethon’s hands.)

Daphne’s memories faded. Phaethon woke. It took him a moment to remember where he was: In a private box, a thought casket, in an Eleemosynary hospice in a lower segment of the orbiting equatorial ring-city, in Deep Dreaming, semipublic thoughtspace.

Phaethon spread his fingers in the gesture of opening; the panels surrounding his balcony winked out. Around him, in tiers, reaching upward, canyonlike, were images and open windows depicting the local mentality.

Underfoot were moving lights indicating traffic, a geometry of doors opening and shutting as temporary scenes, telephone dramas, or teleconference rooms, winked into and out of existence. Overhead, scenes from permanent dreamscapes flashed from higher windows; the cold light of synoetics trembled on the rows still farther above; and at the utmost peak, rising rank upon rank, were the higher Sophotects, the Ennead, and the Earthmind. The Earthmind channels were full (they were always full—everyone wanted to talk to her) and this was represented as a swarm of glowing lines and rainbows that hid the peak of the balconies as if in a cloud of radiance.

Because he was not connected to Rhadamanthus, the local area service did not realize that Phaethon was a Silver-Gray Manorial, and therefore the scene around him did not employ a strict Silver-Gray Protocol. For example, next to him was a table surface, but no table. Instead, a two-dimensional flat surface hung unsupported in the air. Phaethon “sat,” but sitting, here, merely relieved him of sensations of weight and pressure on his feet, and made the lower half of his self-image body disappear.

The table surface had icons floating in it from the Middle Dreaming, so that a glance told him the whole contents of the possible services the local area had on file. A menu displayed the variety of illusions of food and drink that the table could provide. Not being in Silver-Gray territory, his self-image would not be redrawn as pudgy or obese, no matter how much he “ate.”

Other menus promised other services. There were book icons to insert full files into his brain, either directly or as a linear experience. There were pornographic hallucinations; there was a library of full simulations, including pseudomnesia dramas as fully real seeming as any human brain could detect. There were synnoetisms and interfaces to augment his mind and memory, marrying his thoughts to the super-thoughts of distant Sophotechs. There were channels to quench the pain of individuality, open invitations to join with shared minds, both hierarchic and radial-cell formats, or full embrace into the Compositional mass-minds, which would abolish his standing as a separate individual.

The icons of the Compositions floated in the table surface alluringly. Here was the Porphyrogen Composition, a name well worthy of respect, or the ancient Eleemosynary Composition, no longer Earth’s king, but still a Peer, and a voice even the Hortators heeded. There was the token for the

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