The Road to Amber (84 page)

1) Val Sonjin (?) [John Adkin in the first draft] is shown in a bizarre virt environment, from which he is finally extricated to find himself in a human body in the massive caves which house the download facility (“mind-hive”) from which he has apparently been extricated.

2) The robots which have been guarding this apparent final remnant of humanity tell him that they have brought him out of the hive and established him in one of the few functional, abandoned human bodies which had been preserved, explaining that their caretaker job has been expanded on receipt of a distress signal from a place called Reefworld in the asteroid belt. If there are humans out there, they must be protected, too, and a human is needed to pilot a human interface snail-ship to the apparently endangered settlement.

(The Reefworld’s orbit was perturbed by a passing massive object falling sunward from the Oort Cloud. Now, in a few generations, Reefworld will also be toppling sunward. The Reefworlders had given up ages ago on trying to reach hypothetical survivors of the Age of Sunstorms—but now a broad-band SOS is their only hope.)

3) The robots also explain to Val that they have another need for his services. (Their
real
reason for wanting him.) They wish to arrest the deterioration of the Earth by having him, an engineer, employ existing equipment to produce an insulation belt about the dying Earth, to prolong the hive’s existence.

4) There is another surviving human society, located on the moon. They devolved voluntarily, electing to pursue the ways of the mind, developing complex and profound psi powers.

Avilyn Mum is one such—a powerful telepath, a member of the Caste of Watchers, aware of the ReefWorlders and even the Oorters in their spaghetti-like space caverns beyond the System’s rim. In her constant scanning, she becomes aware that there is suddenly a human awareness on Earth beyond the background buzz of the hive.

5) She also becomes aware of Val’s synthetic nature, knowing that he is not a real man but an artificial being, assembled of pieces and remains from the hive’s memory bank solely to perform the insulation work mentioned above. His mind is a layered jumble which she feels is in danger of coming apart on the trip to ReefWorld—the robots have never appreciated the true complexity of the human mind, having cast humanity in their own image.

So she reaches out to him telepathically, stating a desire to accompany him to ReefWorld as his communications officer. Actually, as his headache medicine, using her psi powers to ease the still-developing synthesis of those layers that are his mind.

6) A funny thing happens to them on the way to ReefWorld, leading a pod of whale tugs. Val becomes aware of the altered nature of the solar system and hears the story from Avilyn: The outer planets—Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter—are missing, having been rendered into massive accumulations of objects in outer orbits. Also out there are pieces of macromachinery, designed—but never used—for purposes of employing these raw materials in some sort of gigantic solar engineering project.

It becomes obvious to Val that the solar system is running down—the sun dimmer than memory seems to recall, the remaining planets more advanced in their evolution. The Sol System is dying. (This goes back to the Age of the Sunstorms, which wiped out most of humanity and wrecked the Dysonizing project that might have saved the System. Now it is almost too late…)

7) Contact with ReefWorld is established. ReefWorld is pushed back into an acceptable orbit. Chambered Nautilus (?).

8) The robots know that this is the last generation before the technological tipping point beyond which the solar system might not be saved by Dysonizing. They have or had access to the equipment but no one to operate it. The distress of the asteroid colony was a fluke, coming when it did, but an excellent ploy for creating Val and sending him on a rescue mission during which he can be educated concerning humanity’s peril.

Val realizes now that he is the last being capable of activating the Dysonizing equipment. This is the tipping point. If it is not done now, it never will be done, and the path to entropy lies clear. The moon people no longer understand the technology; the ReefWorlders lack understanding of the interface linkages; the Oorters have evolved into ethnocentric claustrophobes.

To do this, he must sacrifice himself, peeling away his identity layer by layer and leaving each as the operating system for one of the giant pieces of equipment. Regretfully, he does this with Avilyn’s assistance, hoping that when he has given his all, there might still be some small core of humanity remaining from which he might build a new, true self.

This proves to be the case, and the giant project is set in motion. But on his return to Earth he realizes that the Earth itself can be restored rather than merely insulated—as a new, organic-mechanico synthesis—saving the current hive of humanity as a functioning, if radically altered, entity if he will sacrifice the last of himself to empower and instruct existing systems. He elects to do this, bidding good-bye to those few things he has but recently learned to love.

Yet the pieces of his consciousness are somehow joined in a kind of immanent consciousness/presence on Earth and with the project, giving a kind of mystical view of the whole system as it is rejuvenated along new lines.

There are two known versions of this outline; the first, handwritten manuscript is entitled “D. B.”; the second, typed revision lacks a title. The handwritten version says, “but the Dysonized Biological equipment needs a mental link of some sort,” so “D. B.” is probably “Dysonized Biologicals.” Zelazny changed the protagonist’s name from John Adkin to Val Sonjin between drafts with a (?) indicating that both names were tentative. Zelazny probably wrote this outline in 1993; it resides among handwritten drafts of
Donnerjack
dated 1993 and a biography of Fred Saberhagen Zelazny wrote for Philcon 93. This volume’s version incorporates some material left out of the typed revision.

Dysonized
refers to Freeman Dyson, the English-born American physicist and mathematician who theorized about space colonies, space travel and extraterrestrial life. He proposed that intelligent species would be found occupying an artificial biosphere that completely surrounds its parent star (a Dyson Sphere).
Virt
means virtual reality. The
Oort Cloud
is a cluster of matter orbiting the sun out to about a light year’s distance, proposed as the source of comets that approach the sun.

B
ackground: Mid to late 21st century, a world featuring a global computer network, easy organ transplants, genetic engineering, in-system space travel, space habitats, lunar cities, a Mars base. Standard expected model for general stuff.

Getting more specific, let us zero in on that computer network. This is going to be a non-cyberpunk story in which that network will provide considerable environment. Yes, there is this world computer network with access to everything—national library, public records, World [shared]-type data in realtime. Enormous computer capaciry, both analog and digital, lots of VR. Various [channels] and encrypted databases possess special areas of access, of course, as now, and entertainment within its precincts is a pay-as-you-go matter, Electronic Cash changing accounts at the instant of command.

Much of the entertainment, as well as a good deal of the business, is conducted in Virtual Realiry (VR) spaces, extensions of the sort discussed in the latter sections of Howard Reingold’s recent book
Virtual Reality
(Simon & Schuster Summit Book, 1991) where full sensory feedback from a computer construct can substitute this artificial reality for the consensus domestic variery. (
i.e.
, one might go bowling on Virtual lanes, attend services in a Virtual church, get laid in a Virtual whorehouse, etc.) None of this is achieved by a cerebral “jacking-in” process, hooking up a human nervous system with the network by means of physical implants in the human body. No. This is all done directly with the senses, with hologrammatic representation and laser forcefield pressure inductions. Recreational parlors of this sort are as common as theaters are now, and the wealthy may have such setups in their own homes. This is considered 2
^nd
stage (exogenous) interaction with the systems (first stage being simple hybrid or visual control and appropriate terminal response, normally on a screen). These are often mediated by special unit AIs of varying degrees of sophistication.

Endogenous interactions are of the sort involving linkage between network and nervous system (3
^rd
stage), but by means of induction fields rather than mechanical coupling. These results are normally highly [informatic] and are meant for more technical operations, as opposed to teleconferencing and recording at the 2
^nd
stage. Theoretically, a [person’s] 3
^rd
stage interactions could be used to produce 2
^nd
stage effects. But why bother when 2
^nd
stage is itself so much easier to employ?

While the network is full of AIs of varying [complexity], performing [many] functions, hardly anyone realizes what all else it has accumulated over the centuries-plus that the network has been in existence—let alone that entropy and evolution are occurring within it in very special ways.

Drifting also in the network are all sorts of rogue AIs (Aions) who’ve created renegade programs, intelligences who’ve gone over the hill, and intelligences created by other “free” AIs and (it’s been said) even some who’ve evolved deep within the system. There are many layers of complexity to the network. The lowest, to use a spatial metaphor, is Dark Fields, the place in which all crashed programs, discarded data, broken Aions, finally come to rest. All of the system’s discards wind up in this plane of entropy. Those which do not come to it easily are gathered by its resident master, an Aion best known as Death. Death collects the dead. Apart from this, Death’s only pleasure seems to be music—a hard thing to come by in the Dark Fields, place of discord and of silence.

Other intelligences have evolved (and perhaps [external tunneling] by Virtùe of their access to all recorded knowledge of history, religion, and mythology) within the broad [residential] bands—both licit and underground—of the VR arena where Real Time (RT) humans take their vacations. These have developed great similarities (and powers) similar to those of the native gods of all the great mythologies. Nymph and satyr figures in pleasure areas. Bacchus and Dionysus [figures], too (and the [Furies] in those dark places where [pleasure] and [madness] are close to each other). Ahriman-like figure in the higher [realms] of [catechism]. And an analog from out of human history (and pre-history) lives somewhere within the rest, if one could but find the way.

I don’t think we’ll call it the Network, though. We’ll call it Virtù—both in reference to Virtual Reality and in the 18th century scene it suggests, of art, curios, artifacts—since it will replicate the greatest artifacts the human race has created.

And who is Donnerjack (John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Jr. to be precise)?

* * *

In a world such as we’ve just described, people can work out of their homes, conferring in the net, meeting in VR (thus giving themselves whatever appearance they choose). Virtual universities—campuses as well as classrooms, if it’s Ivy League or otherwise expensive—can exist in VR. John D’Arcy Donnerjack, Sr., was a famous academic there with some nutty ideas, inventing rogue intelligences within the system, etc. But he was also a much sought-after consultant in matters of VR architecture—perhaps best known as the man who’d constructed a Virtual representation of Dante’s Inferno.

Obsessed with his near-occult ideas of hidden intelligences within Virtù, he has retired with his wife Sarah to a castle in Scotland—a rundown property which had been in the family for years. He proceeded to renovate the place, laying miles and miles of fiber optic cable as well as erecting powerful antennas, to turn it into a somewhat comfortable—if forbidding—home workplace staffed by robots, with massive VR potential. Thus he made his living as a consultant and devoted most of his time to research. And time with his wife Sarah. No one he finds, it turns out later, knows her. Where’d she come from? There seems to be no record of her birth.

He finds evidence of the background material I discussed—not yet common knowledge—within Virtù. And more. After a year or so his son is born there—Sarah, alas, dying in childbirth. He holds himself responsible (perhaps rightly) for her death, for relying on robot midwifery rather than taking her to a hospital, and he goes ever down to psychosis, giving his son into the care of the robots and devoting every waking hour to his work.

One day he is found slumped over a computer terminal, quite dead. Had he learned too much? Was he done in by an Aion? Whatever, he is buried by the robots in the family plot, next to a grave marked “Sarah” and the robots, under the command of a [strange] Aion instruction to care for John D ‘Arcy Donnerjack, Jr.

The old man’s death is not reported to the authorities. His Virtual image still teleconferences. His consultant work goes on in his home. He is paid by means of EFT; his taxes are paid in the same manner. Food is delivered by helicopters every month or so, delivery taken by the robots, payment made by EFT.

Most ofthe boy’s time is spent in VR. When he “escapes” he’s either lurking about a spooky castle (complete with RT ghosts to keep the complaints rolling) or in the company of Aion-controlled robots.

Okay. His upbringing is a 21 st century equivalent of Tarzan’s—Virtù instead ofthe jungle, Aions instead of apes and other creatures. Parable for the machine age—this is the closest the century can manage to Rousseau’s natural man.