Lightpaths Read Free Page B

about it, and fast.
    Lev Korchnoi—he had helped her hook up the ‘Boxes. Maybe he would have some explanation. Lakshmi called up the habitat’s Public Sphere, the “marketplace of ideas” virtual construct where Lev spent a lot of his time, particularly in the “anti-Platonics” group area, pontificating and soapboxing to all who might be interested about how rigid specialization was what made Plato’s Republic fascistic at base, how that was what led him to banish the polymorphous poets, how the city-state of this habitat must be the inverse of that, strongly anti-specialist if it hoped to preserve its participatory democracy, etc., etc., blahdeblahdeblah.
    WELCOME TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE, said a portal caption as Lakshmi popped up into the center of that virtual locale. The greeting was immediately followed by a quote from the philosopher Rorty: “A peaceful public sphere characterized by conversation is a utopian idea, but it’s the best utopian idea we’ve got.” For Lakshmi, it was calming, comforting just to be back in this virtual space—so familiar, functioning so smoothly. Knowing too some of the flaming discussions that had occurred in the Sphere, Lakshmi had to smirk at the “peaceful conversation” of that Rorty quote.
    She scanned the virtual sphere around her. Every “speaker” or “auditor” was, from his or her perspective, always standing at the center, while the personas of everyone else logged in floated through the virtual space roundabout—a sphere with center everywhere, circumference nowhere. Lev wasn’t currently logged in, but his personal system was on and monitoring. Lakshmi called up his persona-icon.
    Transcript of L. Korchnoi statement, 10:04-10:10 GMT, 6.6.29.
    No, you’ve got it backwards. What is counted as true is that which tends to perpetuate the reigning political power structure. Truth is politically constrained. The metaphysical is the political. Scientific materialism was developed by the middle and managerial classes as an ideological weapon for use against the tyranny of church and landed aristocracy. Think of all the great inventions and discoveries not as sudden bright ideas or revelations alone, but also as high points in a million-year-old revolutionary process, ideological weapons developed in the ongoing struggle against many forms of perceived tyranny. Think of the discovery of fire as a blow—
    Typical Lev. Lakshmi had heard variants of this agitprop shtik more times than she cared to remember. She called up his personal number and sent him a message stating that she wanted to talk to him. He sent back, telling her to switch to holophone, which she did.
    “Hey, Laksh,” said the albino-blond man in the viewer. “How’s the work coming on my skysign of soft advertisement? Hmm? The big Mob Cad show’s sooner than we think, you know.”
    “Working on it, working on it. Look, Lev, something’s come up with those LogiBoxes we brought on-line last week.”
    She told him about the way the system-construct on the ‘Boxes was preventing her from hacking into their operations, about the way whatever was running on the ‘Boxes was identifying and intermixing with the net coordinator.
    “Is that all?” Lev said, nonplused. “You should be happy—at least it’s working. That’s more than I can say for my show robots. Even their bugs have bugs!”
    “But there’s more to it than that,” Lakshmi pressed. “Just now several of my waldoes started doing things on their own. It’s like they’re trying to do some kind of project. Other things, too, over the last several days...”
    “What things?”
    “Well,” Lakshmi began, knowing she was into it now. “Over the last seventy-two hours there’s been an increased rate of malfunction and ‘defection’ among some of the nanotech assemblers and other mechanorganics, for instance.”
    “Minor glitches,” Lev said in his flat American English, rubbing his square jaw.
    “Then what about the appearance