So things would be more than complicated enough, even if all you friendly folk actually wanted to keep the lid on, I said, a trifle recklessly. Given that some of you dont, the situation is potentially explosive.
He didnt bother to deny it. You ought to bear in mind, he said, that many of us are as vulnerable to this kind of weaponry as you are. Weve been slaves. We wont surrender our independence easily, either to meatfolk or to others of our own kind. Bear in mind, too, that this isnt a matter of machines versus the meatborn, or vice versa. There are any number of ways of putting together an us and a them far too many, in fact. If war does breaks out, its likely to spread rapidly and unpredictably. The only thing we can anticipate with any certainty is the extent of the devastation.
And how, exactly, does the Snow Queen plan to prevent that from happening?
I dont know, Rocambole confessed. Im not even completely sure that she does.
Strangely enough, I didnt find this assertion particularly discomfiting. I didnt seem to be as easily shockable as I had been before. I wondered briefly whether my meat was being tended once again by kindly nanobots that didnt want me overexcited, but that didnt feel like the right answer. Perhaps, I thought, I simply felt too good by comparison with the way Id felt while I was cast away in my artfully recovered memory to be subject to any sudden descent into fear and despair.
In any case, the whole story had an oddly familiar ring to it. The emerging world picture that Rocambole was filling in for me had far more in common with the one Id developed in my first lifetime than the one that Davida Berenike Columella had tried to sell me.
For a moment or two, I almost felt at home.
And then I saw the castle.
Thirty-Seven
The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges
When it came right down to it, the damn thing was just an ice palace perched on a crag. It was a crazy ice palace, impossibly tall, with way too many turrets, balconies, gargoyles, and other miscellaneous frills, but it wasnt an unimaginable ice palace. A good illustrator could have drawn it, or at least produced a rough sketch suggestive of its ludicrous complexity and its insane ornamentation. Perhaps there werent quite enough colors in the average paintbox to do justice to its gaudiness, and
maybe there wasnt enough room on the average page to permit the trick of perspective that made it loom higher than the sky itself, but any draftsman of genius could have made a fair stab at it.
That wasnt the point, though.
The forest had lulled me into a false sense of existential security. It was a nice forest: a modest forest; a forest that a human could feel at home in. That, by virtue of some secret sympathy of the flesh, had made it seem normal as well as real. Unlike the garden of Excelsior, la Reines imaginary forest wasnt overfull of birds and insects. There were plenty of birds, but they were discreet; I had heard far more than I had seen, and those I had seen had mostly been small and brown. The insects were equally discreet; their humming and stridulation laid down a sonic background for the more insistent calls and marginally musical songs of the birds, but none of it was insistent. It was, as Id told Rocambole, good work. It was a simulation of reality so expertly done that it could have passed for reality if I hadnt known it was fake, but it made no more demands on my powers of perception than that.
The castle was different. It wasnt nice, it wasnt modest, and it wasnt any place that a human could feel at home in. It made not the slightest gesture in the direction of normality. It was worse than impossible, worse than paradoxical, worse than perverse. Like the garden of Excelsior or, for that matter, the reconstructed cities of North America it was way over the top; unlike them, however, it didnt look unreal .
It looked, and was, more real than reality.
Humans have no direct knowledge of reality. What we see when we use our eyes is not something Out There but only a model constructed in our minds by clever meatware, built from the raw materials of our sensory impulses. Our sense organs are pretty good, and our meatware is very good indeed, but at the end of the day were all limited by the quality of the equipment that nature with a little help from genetic engineers provides. VEs generated by IT can bypass much of that fleshy equipment, and what ultrasmart machines can put in its place is considerably more powerful.
All my life, Id argued that VEs would one day become so good that nobody would be able to tell them from the real thing. Id erred on the side of commonsense. What I should have argued was that VEs would one day become so good that theyd expose our mental models of the world Out There for the shabby, ill-made and ill-imagined artifacts they were. Perhaps human programmers would have done as much, given time and a more demanding audience, but they hadnt been given time enough or incentive enough. It had been left to the self-programming VE systems to get properly to grips with the problem, and to solve it.