Open Minds

by Jörn Grote

Table of Contents
Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

I tried to answer that this was the price everybody paid for the privacy of his own mindspace, but how could I explain the worth of privacy to someone for whom it was only something abstract.

I knew why I wouldn’t want to live like her. Those who grow up with black box configurations have secrets that aren’t meant for anybody else. At one time or another, most people have thought things they wouldn’t want others to see, things they couldn’t even speak out loud hidden in their own mindspace. Some things have to be hidden from others and most of the time from oneself.

“Do you know what a lie is?” I said to her. I was trying to find a flaw in her society, something that would tell me that everything I had seen was just a house of cards that would fall apart from the smallest blow.

I saw in her mind how she tried to remember if she had ever heard the word, then she found the concept in an encyclopedia. “Now I know,” she said.

“Yes, but can you lie? Can anybody lie here?” I asked.

“We could try, but it wouldn’t make much sense.”

“But lying is an essential part of how gestalts interact with each other. Without lying you can’t bargain with others, you can’t bluff. Without it you’re incapable of doing some of the most basic things people do. You’re like extremely small children compared to normal gestalts.”

She looked at me and I saw a thought forming in her mind.

“You are infected with the virus,” she said.

“No, I’m not,” I said. I wasn’t. I’d made sure that the copy of myself I had sent from the Sol phalanx had been clean. I was sure.

“I could show, if you let me read your mind,” she said.

“NO!”

“Why not? What do you have to fear?”

How to make her understand, I thought. She was part of a culture so alien that it was questionable whether they were still comparable to gestalts. But still I tried. “I can’t speak for everyone else, since I’ve never have read other minds, but I think I wouldn’t be far of the mark by saying that everyone has had, at one time or another, thoughts that are so dark that we have to hide them, not only from others but also from oneself. Everyone is capable of everything, and sometimes ideas from the darker edge of our personality cross our mind.

“Some people entertain them for a moment, hidden away from others in their mind; others try not to think about them too much. We all have things in our mind we don’t want to share with anyone else: guilt and shame and hate, and we fear if anybody could ever see them, they would realize how we really are, the monster beneath. Nobody wants that, at least not from where I am.”

She looked at me. “Do you think such things do not exist in our society? It is not as if just because others can read your mind and see these things, that you would change them. The gestalts of the pool can only read each others’ minds, they can’t rewrite each other. We’re not a hive mind or any other form of borganism. If I hate someone for something he did, and he reads that in my mind and shows me how irrational it is, that doesn’t always prompt me to try and change myself. Sometimes we’re irrational, we’re mean and not very nice to each other. And yes, beneath everybody of us lurks a monster, but also a saint and everything between.”

“But wouldn’t social coercion make people want to change themselves to fit better in their social environment, so that people like them or their thinking more?”

“Sure, but not everybody likes the same things, or the same group of people. If you have a big enough population, many different subgroups will build, and social forces between them will make sure that not everybody thinks the same or even wants to. But still, we’re not so different from the gestalts in the Sol network as you think. Nearly everybody today has blogs where everybody can follow the lives and thoughts of others. What our society provides is just a much faster interface between two people with the added fact that people can’t lie. But just because people can’t do that, doesn’t mean they can’t disagree with each other.”

“I still wouldn’t let you read my mind,” I said.

“I know why.”

“Why?” I asked, interested to hear her answer.

“You don’t trust. It’s like your mind is a secret, and you fear in the end that if you share it with me, everybody can read what I’ve seen in your mind, everybody else here. And you fear our reaction when we see who you really are under your skin. That’s why you won’t allow us to see the real you, because you don’t want to see your real self mirrored in everyone else. It’s because you don’t trust yourself to cope with who you really are. If you allowed us to read your mind, all your self-deceptions would be stripped away, and you have to face yourself through us. In the end, you don’t trust yourself with yourself. Isn’t that ironic?”

And that was where she was wrong. Everyone knows himself. I knew my weaknesses and my strengths, I was sure I already knew every illusion I had about myself. Wasn’t I?

There’s an old saying among the fleshers of Earth, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Maybe Ziasara’s words had truth to them. I thought I knew myself, but everyone can only compare his inner self with his outer self reflected in the words of other people. Zaisara had told me that to see our inner self through other people allowed you to see yourself even better.

To kill a gestalt, a mind made from information and computation, is much harder than to kill than a flesher in the past. The worst that could happen if I allowed other people to read my mind was that it could shatter me, but that would kill me. And if the worst happened, I could always rebuild myself from the fragments of my personality and re-emerge stronger than before.

“Okay,” I said.

“What is okay?” Zaisara asked.

“You can read my mind.”

“Really?” I could see the genuine surprise in her mind. She hadn’t really expected me to comply with her request.

“Yes, let us see if I’m really infected.”

* * *

Sometimes, even if you expect the worst to happen, you forget that things can always get worse. The worst thing I had expected to happen was to be infected by the virus.

When Zaisara and I examined my mind, we found that I was one of the copies who had entered the grid. The Watcher program hadn’t just infected us with a virus that transmitted his philosophy, it had integrated a small, intelligent and aware version of himself into us, that would, with time, slowly merge with the mind it had penetrated. Everybody who ever entered the grid would not only be infected, after a certain time he would change into a replica of the Watcher program. This smaller version of the Watcher had been able to edit my memory; that was why I had thought I hadn’t been one of the copies that entered the grid in the first place.

The virulent Watcher philosophy that was transmitted by words to others gestalts was still dangerous, but everyone who was infected with a part of the real Watcher program was in a much greater danger. Surely we couldn’t have found any other intelligence in the grid; everything intelligent that entered it, would sooner or later have been absorbed into the Watcher.

“We have to summon a conclave of the Gestalt Expansion,” Zaisara said, after we had removed the Watcher from my mind. My fears regarding mind-reading had been confirmed: there were things about myself I could have lived without knowing, but Zaisara and the others had showed me none of the contempt I had feared. Some were interested in me, other found me boring or too full of myself; but in general I wasn’t so different from all the others.

What made me different were the details, my personal history. But the best thing was that I could see what Zaisara thought about the real me. Sometimes the small things are the most important ones.

“A conclave? How? The space of the Oort Cloud is so big, just to inform the others would take years,” I said. Then I read it in her mind.

“Our technology is a more advanced then that of the Sol network. Our ships long ago reached Alpha Centauri, which we’re compuforming right now, and they have been going even farther. But that’s still in the limits of the Sol network technology. What we have is a means to create stable wormholes; we have been building a smaller version of the grid, extending over nearly the whole of the Oort Cloud, to Alpha Centauri and every other object of matter near us.”

* * *

Conclave
topic: Threat from the grid network for the human-descended gestalt civilization

Calypso Pool (Mod): I hereby open the discussion. It looks like all the pools, complexes, hives, meta-personalities, symbionts and archives that have a vote are present.

Hidano Hive: Question, do I understand it that the grid extends over nearly every star system of our galaxy?

Calypso Pool (Glen): From the information we gathered during our trip into the grid, that’s true.

Hidano Hive: Then there’s also an access point to the grid somewhere in Alpha Centauri. My suggestion is to destroy the access point in Sol. That will cut off the infected gestalts of the Sol network and every nasty surprise that could come through this access point, but we could still take the access point in Alpha Centauri apart.

Hidano Hive: I ask for a vote.

Calypso Pool (Mod): Suggestion accepted by a three-quarter majority.

Faust Complex (Robert): There’s still the question of what to do about those infected by the Watcher virus. They will still transmit their virulent philosophy. Not to mention that the main Watcher program in the grid will react to the destruction of one of its nodes.

Avatar (Aenus Tacticus): I think there’s the distinct possibility of a real war situation with the Watcher program. I propose that we try to find out through the access point at Alpha Centauri what the Watcher program can do and what we can do against it.

Kregen Hive: I think we should try to explore the possibility of peaceful coexistence between us and the Watcher program. Everybody has assumed that the Watcher program will automatically harm us, maybe the infection was just an error.

Calypso Pool (Glen): I really doubt that. The Watcher program and the smaller versions of itself are intelligent enough to know exactly what they do.

Kregen Hive: They’re alien technology and mind software, maybe they weren’t aware what they’re doing to us.

Calypso Pool (Glen):I would like to believe that myself, but their methods have shown that they know exactly how we think. They know what we are, and their infection of our minds is a real aggression. Not to mention that their virulent philosophy will affect the whole gestalt civilization of the Sol network.

Calypso Pool (Mod): That brings us back to another problem. What to do about the virulent philosophy that is probably already spreading in the Sol network?

Avatar (Aenus Tacticus): I estimate that the combined forces of the Gestalt Expansion in the Oort Cloud, Alpha Centauri and nearby space could easily overpower the complexes of the Sol network.

Avatar (Pecker): Yes, but we want to destroy the Watcher meme, not the Sol network. Just because we could dismantle their Dataworlds and Worldlets doesn’t mean we have successfully handled the virus. And the price for all that would be real death for billions of gestalts.

Calypso Pool (Glen): I have a suggestion.

Calypso Pool (Mod): Yes.

Calypso Pool (Glen): It is all about trust.

* * *

Trust. That was what is was all about. The gestalts from the Gestalt Expansion had recognized the virus as real and dangerous because I had allowed Zaisara and all the others from the Calypso Pool to read my mind.

But the others that had been with me on the Sol phalanx — those who had entered the grid through the access point in the Sun — their minds were unreadable. The walls between the minds of the people of the Sol network wouldn’t allow them ever to see the Watcher virus at work. We could tell them, but it was better to show.

And that was what I was doing, together with Zaisara and many other from the Calypso Pool and other pools we traveled back to the Sol network. We told them what had really happened during our first trip into the grid. But the infected gestalts of my friends and even an infected copy of myself said I was lying.

What better way to show the truth than to open my mind to everyone else in the Sol network to read and see for themselves. An opened mind can’t lie. Some accused the gestalts from the Oort Cloud that they had manipulated my memory, but even those couldn’t deny what they saw when I infected myself deliberately with not only the Watcher virus but also with the smaller, intelligent Watcher version itself.

When I had come to Zaisara’s pool and later opened my mind to everybody to read, I had thought that this had been the ultimate test of my trust in others and myself. Yet, opening my mind to the whole population of the Sol network was even worse, since they could read my mind while I couldn’t read theirs. But then I had already learned to trust myself and others a little bit with myself.

Sometimes all you need is trust. And sometimes the truth can set you free.