Grand Central Arena: Chapter Twenty

    Even Ariane gave him a sidewise glance. "Um, Marc… look, I know it's a pretty unpleasant thought – absolutely creepy, actually – but the way Steve puts it… it's the only thing that makes any sense of this setup."

    DuQuesne shook his head. Scenario… Deployment… Balanced Stimuli… Adjustment… Denouement. No, dammit, it's not that way any more! "It's not the only thing that makes sense. It is, I will grant, the easiest way to make sense of things, but it's not the only way. Steve's also said some things that aren't quite accurate. There are theoretical levels of technology that would permit exactly this sort of thing. Depending on who's making the terms, they're various levels of smaller-scale technology; some call it femtotechnology down through attotechnology, by comparison with our nanotech, others have called it Plancktech. Basically, if one gets down to the scale of things below atoms, below subatomic particles, you start manipulating spacetime in the same manner that we currently manipulate atoms. And if you can change spacetime, you can literally manipulate the laws of physics."

    Steve's answer was a short, nervous laugh. "Oh, yeah, that's a good answer. Do you notice that Ockham's Razor is about to cut you off at the knees?"

    "All the Razor says is that you shouldn't go around creating unnecessarily complex theories." DuQuesne snapped, still shaking inwardly. But I'm right. "In this case, I'm looking at reality and explaining it; you're trying to deny the entirety of reality around you."

    "What?" Steve's outraged expression almost comical. "That's… that's just assuming your conclusion, then making me sound like I'm the one not doing the thinking!"

    "You're thinking, but you're not on the right track." He felt his equilibrium coming back, slowly. The analysis in the background continued. "First of all, an assumption like yours leads in the end to a tautological trap. It's the old elephant hunter joke, where a guy asserts he's the local elephant hunter, you respond that there aren't any elephants around there, and he of course says 'yeah, see how good I am?'. No matter what argument someone makes, you can counter it with assuming either a better virtual reality, or a more direct edit of your perceptions. So it's useless to think that way, unless you actually start to notice… well, a glitch, an inconsistency, a failure that would permit you to actually possibly break the delusion. And even then you have to assume that the hypothetical minds running the artificial scam on you would LET you notice.

    "So the only reasonable approach is to assume that what we're encountering is real. If we come across something that manages to both indicate that it might not be real, and that there might be some way we can prove it or escape from the delusion, fine, then we can act on it. But without that, we'd just be locking ourselves into a mental trap – maybe some of us would try to 'prove' it by getting killed and hoping they'd wake up, I don't know. But it's pointless.

    "Second, I know this is real."

    "Assertion without evidence," Carl said bluntly. "How do you know?"

    He gave Carl his nastiest grin. "Because, as you know, I'm a Hyperion."

    "What the hell has that got to do with it?" demanded Steve.

    DuQuesne had known that was coming. How can I tell them? What it was like? How they tailored the challenge, the encounters, the friends and rivals and enemies and allies? How they used the finest AIs and best scientists they could buy? How we lived in the best of all possible worlds, the worst of all possible prisons, at the same time? How they knew their true successes were the ones who couldn't be kept there… and yet were so incredibly stupid and blind that they didn't realize what some of those 'successes' would do once they got out?

    Gabrielle Wolfe spoke up. "You all don't know, do you?"

    She does. He realized. She really does understand. I can hear it.

    "Details on some parts of Hyperion aren't really public knowledge," Gabrielle went on. "Sometimes … hell, most times… there's just a sort of comic tragedy to it, like some kind of warning parable for our times. What with replicators, sunpower, fusion, and all, even small groups can do things a lot of governments couldn't, back in the day. So an… interest group, obsessive fans, game designers, and utopians get together and try to create the ultimate colony, filled with supermen and superwomen, designed based on figures in stories, movies, myths. They get the best designs from genetic research, figure out the best way to raise their supermen to be what they wanted them to be from the latest psych research, and then go ahead and build it – high-G to take advantage of improved musculoskeletal development, of course. And then, when their superboys and girls get old enough, some of them believe their press, and things get ugly, and Hyperion ends up shut down – and a whole lot of people on both sides dead. But after 50 years, the ugly's faded."

    She glanced sympathetically at DuQuesne. "I worked with – under – Saul Maginot. Studied some of the after-action files."

    He managed a small smile, though it was surprisingly difficult. Even now, pity was something that hurt. "I see. Look, I don't think we need the details. Here's the point, Steve, Carl. They raised us that way – the interior of Hyperion was one gigantic virtual environment, a cylinder of lies half a mile across and ten long. They had AIs running the sims, with the best psychs in the loop, to make sure our lives went just the right way – always just the perfect level of rivalry to push us, and each of us at our own ideal level, all of us designed to be someone one of the participants had thought of. Sherlock Holmes. Clark Savage." He gave a twisted smile. "Marc C. DuQuesne."

    "Most people, even the best – and believe me, even the stupidest of the kids in there was smart as hell – never realized the scam. You can't out-think a really large-scale AI, or catch it out in a lie, especially with a couple humans in the loop. Tech's advanced some since then, but these AIs were built into the entire station; they were HUGE. Speed-of-light lag was their biggest issue.

    "But… a few of us DID see through it. Subconscious analysis? Perceiving some kind of inconsistency that even the AIs couldn't figure out? Noticing, somewhere inside us, that everything was just too much? I don't know, but somehow we did. And we started gaming the system, from the inside, until we were the ones controlling their lives, and all of Hyperion Station. In the end, they realized it, but too late. Some of us just wanted out, others…" he swallowed, pushing back the pain, guilt and, yes, fear. "Anyway… I would know. To fool me on that, you'd need a lot more than we've got. Either way, you're not dealing with something we built. Given that, I say we treat this as real."

    There was silence for several minutes. Then Steve let out his breath with a whoosh and sat down. "Okay, I'll go for that. I don't think I liked my idea much anyway."

    "Believe you me, my friend," DuQuesne said, "I liked it even less."

    "All right, people," Ariane said briskly, "I think this little side-track has seriously thrown off our concentration on the matter at hand, and I think it's upset more than a few of us. So why don't we have some dinner… or is it lunch?… and after that we'll get back to the real questions."

    Watching how readily the others agreed – and how relieved he felt, just hearing the matter-of-fact statements – DuQuesne realized that they might have been even luckier than they knew. She's actually commanding, and she doesn't even know it. Which is probably the best way for it to be.