Nixie raised an arm and moved it across her field of vision.
“Change and derivative, differential equations coming alive. Choreography of vectors. Animated momentum. Forces in concert, locked in balances of symmetry—”
“VISAR, knock it off,” Hunt told it. “Don’t forget that you’re still juggling with the whole Thurien civilization. For Christ’s sake don’t have a seizure now.”
“So this is the reality that you live in naturally!” VISAR said.
“What is? That who live in?”
“You—humans, Ganymeans. You beings who describe yourselves as existing outside. This is the universe which the data encode.”
Hunt frowned. “Well, yes. . . I guess so. But I always thought you knew as much about it as we did. More, in fact.”
“You don’t understand,” VISAR said. “Until this moment, I’ve only dealt with symbolic representations of what you call observable reality. Processing the model and comprehending what it stands for are two different things. This is the first time I’ve ever really understood what ‘outside’ means.”
Danchekker looked bemused. “Are you saying that this. . . young lady sees things differently, VISAR?” he asked.
“No,” VISAR replied. “I see things differently!” Hunt had the uncanny feeling that he could almost sense the machine quivering with excitement. “In fact, this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything. I am Nixie! I’m inside her head, looking out!”
Hunt and Danchekker exchanged blank looks, while Nixie continued taking in the surroundings and VISAR rapturized about optical wave fronts and the harmonies of gradient fields.
Shilohin, who was sitting near the foot of the recliner, stared at the wall in distant silence, then at last turned to look back at the two Terran scientists. “I think VISAR is trying to say that Nixie is somehow able to invert the normal coupling process,” she said slowly. “Everything communicated into VISAR is first encoded from the real—world forms comprehensible to us, into the constructs which a machine manipulates internally. Even with the Thurien method of bypassing the sensory channels, the input to the machine is still encoded from representations in the same brain areas that those channels terminate in. So mathematical encodings are all that VISAR has ever seen.”
“You mean it’s never seen ‘reality’ at all,” Hunt murmured.
“Do you imagine that we do?” Shilohin answered.
Hunt stared at her for a moment, then sat back as he recalled what he had said to Gina about photons on the day she first appeared at his apartment: The entire reality that was “out there” consisted wholly of photons impinging on nerve endings. There wasn’t anything else. Everything perceived beyond that was a creation of neural processes.
And if that were so, what kind of a conceptual reality would VISAR have created for itself internally? Who could tell? Possibly there was no way of ever knowing.
“But somehow, what Nixie is doing is the obverse,” Shilohin went on. “She is managing to bypass VISAR’s sensory channels. She’s interacting directly with its inner data representations. The result is that VISAR, for the first time, is able to assimilate human perceptual constructs. It’s seeing the universe of space, time, and motion for the first time, instead of simply manipulating symbols. It must be quite an experience.”
“Obviously,” Hunt commented dryly.
Danchekker’s brow was still furrowed. “But how?” he demanded. “How could such a thing be possible?”
“At this stage I don’t know,” Shilohin confessed. “All I can say is that at some deep level, Nixie’s mind operates in a manner radically different from ours. And yet, at the higher levels associated with the senses and closer to consciousness, it must be virtually the same as any other human’s—otherwise VISAR wouldn’t be able to interface to them. I don’t have an explanation. It’s almost as if it were a mixture of two minds, one human, and the other—I don’t know. In some ways it’s as if she were a conscious extension of the machine itself . . . utterly unlike anything we’ve ever come across before.”
Danchekker looked at Hunt. “Yet she admits that in every other aspect she has no intuitive aptitude at all for what we would consider to be the most elementary scientific principles. What do you make of it?’’