Danchekker stared at Hunt with a pained expression for a few seconds; he turned his head toward Shilohin as if for support, then back to Hunt again. “You’re being logically absurd. Either these are externally induced psychotic delusions, or they are not. If they are, then their nature will vary from individual to individual. Any similarity that you see is a fabrication of your own prejudices, Vie, not a property of the world outside. If they are not delusions, then reality must have changed in an identical way for one group of people, but at the same time stayed the same for the rest of us. How could that be? The idea is preposterous.”
“Unless they transferred, somehow, from an alternative, shared paradigm that was equally valid,” Hunt pointed out.
“And where is this alternative reality supposed to be? In the fourth dimension?” Danchekker scoffed. “You’ve been talking to too many Jevlenese.”
“I don’t know where, for Christ’s sake! Maybe that’s what we should be looking for. All I’m saying is the facts point that way. You’re saying that the facts can’t exist because they don’t point the way you think they should.”
“What facts?” Danchekker retorted. “All I’ve heard is pure conjecture—and rather fanciful at that, if I may say so. When you urged being more open-minded, you didn’t say anything about trips to fairyland.”
“Why don’t you try talking to a few ayatollahs?” Hunt suggested.
“I have. It achieves nothing. They’re quite impermeable to logic or reason,” Danchekker replied.
“We have tried getting some of them to cooperate,” Shilohin put in. “But acute insecurity and suspicion of everybody is one characteristic that they do seem to share. They’ve reacted to every experimental environment that we’ve tried to set up as hostile and threatening.”
Hunt looked at her with a curious expression for a moment, and then redirected it at Danchekker. “Well, maybe I can introduce you to one who won’t,” he told them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
If Nixie’s case was typical, there was indeed something immediately apparent that set her kind apart from other Jevlencse and from Terrans and Ganymeans, too, for that matter: When neurally coupled into VISAR, her mode of interaction with the system was entirely different from anything that VISAR had handled before.
For one thing, she was able to retain full awareness of her surroundings at the same time as she experienced the sensory environment communicated by the machine—she could refocus her attention between one and the other, in a manner similar to the normal ability of anybody to watch a movie and follow what was happening in the room. With most users, the system-generated data-stream took over the sensory apparatus, suppressing external sensations completely. And for another, she showed an extraordinary capability that nobody could quite explain, of interacting in a way that went beyond the regular trafficking of sensory information and motor signals, seeming to access the inner processes of the machine itself. This had the effect of reversing the normal state of affairs of machine-organism interaction and adding a new dimension to VISAR’s perceptual universe that was evidently unprecedented.
Hunt had never before heard a computer express genuine awe.
“This is astounding!” VISAR exuberated. “It’s out there! Physical space! Volume, void, continuity, extent. The implicit geometry of the entire domain of a three—variable real—number field, compressed, embodied, and contained in an instantaneous, all-embracing experience. . . I mean, I can feel it, sense it extending away. . . form without shape, structure without substance, enveloping yet describing . .
“My God, it’s getting lyrical,” Hunt murmured. They were using a regular voice channel to communicate with VISAR, since their conscious faculties needed to be free to follow what was going on.
“Extraordinary,” Danchekker agreed.
Nixie, relaxing back in one of the neuro couplers in the UNSA labs and looking as if she was enjoying herself, moved her head to gaze up at a corner of the room where the planes of two walls and the ceiling converged. VISAR responded in wonder. “The superset of point, line, curve, and plane reduced to a perceptual gestalt. The inherent beauty of mathematics, extracted and crystallized. Logical rigor made tangible. Infinity of infinitesimals. Continuum of manifolds . .