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The shifting gray fog wrapped around all Trantor. Voltaire felt how he looked
to that fog: spattered life, electrical jolts in widely separated ma-
chines which computed subjective moment-jumps. The present was a computational
slide orchestrated by hundreds of separate processors.
Rather than living in the present, they persisted more accurately in the
post-past of the calculated step forward.
There was a profound difference, he felt not saw, rut felt, deep in his analog
persuasion between the digital and the smooth, the continuous.
To the fog he was a cloud of suspended moments, sliced numbers waiting to
happen, implicit in the fundamental computation.
Then he saw what the fog was.
He tried to run, but he was a mountain.
'They are others, " he called to Joan uselessly.
"How can they be more different than we?" she replied forlornly. "We, at
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least, were conjured up from human stock. These are alien. "
2.
They had escaped, somehow.
One moment the alien fog had enveloped the mountain ranges. The
He raised a hand and shot her a bolt of knowing:
Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates, or Copies, all such hold a tenuous
existence. Society has decisively rejected what antiquity called the Copy
Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and
that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward
into immortality.
"We must do so to be sure we survive, when the fog catches us? I will slay
them, instead!"
Voltaire laughed. "Your sword they can control it, if they like. They captured
your defense programming, and mine though, as they implied, I
rely mostly upon wit. "
"Dittos... ? I fail to understand. "
"Refuting the Copy Fallacy is straightforward, an exercise in the calculus of
logic. A simple exercise makes the point. Imagine yourself promised that you
will be resurrected digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price
tag you will pay for that, insurance of a sort. Then imagine that, well,
perhaps it would not be started right away, but sometime in future... we
promise. As that date re-
cedes, people's enthusiasm for paying for Self Copies dims demonstrat-
ing that it was the hope of continuity they unconsciously relished. "
"I see. " She vomited into her hand with what she hoped was a ladylike
"Ah. The contradiction of Copying, known in antiquity as Levinson's
Paradox: To the degree that a Copy approaches perfection, it defeats itself.
"
"But you just said "
"In being an absolutely perfect Copy so that no one can tell it from the
Original it transforms the Original
" a duplicate, yes? This means the perfect Copy is no longer a perfect
no
Copy, because it has obliterated, rather than preserved, the uniqueness of the
Original and thus failed to copy a central aspect of the Original. A
perfect, artificial human intelligence would inevitably have this effect on
its natural precursor. " Joan held her head. "Such traps of logic! You are
like the Augustines!" "There is more. Here "
A huge Voltaire appeared on the horizon, striding toward them in velvet
finery. They flew around this
Voltaire Peak and it thundered at them, "I am a Copy, true, but I have thought
on these fogs you encountered. "
"You saw them?" Joan shouted.
"I was made some long intervals ago, but my Lord " the apparition bowed to the
tiny Original " had datapunched me forward. "
"He is a quick study, " the Original said modestly.
The Ditto thundered, "Speaking broadly, I penned of such fogs in my
contempt of these laws, could act as he pleased, solely according to his
caprice. "
"We follow the Creator, not laws. "
Voltaire Ditto waved away the objection, holding his nose against the reek
from below. "The Lord's laws, then, if you demand an author though a great one
stands before you already, my love. " "I doubt your kind of love applies here.
" Peak Voltaire smiled. "Falstaff cried in The Merry Wives of
Windsor, 'Let the sky rain potatoes!' because the new luxury vegetable of
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