The Celestial Instructi0n Read Free Page A

reconnaissance and information security office of the Crux, a
very powerful man in his own right.
    Not short, nor tall—just about
perfectly unremarkable—Michael leaned back and idly viewed one of the
hundred-inch video screens that covered the walls of his immense twelve-sided
office that effectively blocked view of Portland’s grey sky and the rest of the
turrets, spires, cooling towers and monolithic cubes that made up the remainder
of the Crux compound.
    Since early morning the screen’s
curtains had been drawn and were showing various live video feeds, real-time
account balances, locator maps, scrolling news and reference data sets,. But
the one he glanced at now showed a simple multiple-choice question: 0f4a.
argent:cash::absinthe:[choose best answer] The answer choices were: young,
sick, drunk, or gem. Michael instantly chose “young,” considering briefly
“sick” as a second choice. If “gem” had been “money” or had been “emerald,”
that would have been his first pick. Mediated through silver and green.
Disappointingly uncircuitous.
    Interesting how a choice becomes wrong
in a differing context, even though its own character had not changed at all. Language
problems especially, Voide thought. Only among their fellows were particles of
language judged meaningful. In isolation, a word stripped off its vital germ,
as rice polished white and sterile. The correct answer may well depend upon the
precise era in which the question was first posed. But attending to the Crux
was like a career investigating crime or baking bread. It was not as if at the
end of your life you had eradicated criminals, or the hungry, or perfected
human minds through life-long discruciation in the Parich. Perfection of the
mind was an asymptote—just as a Celestial, he would never quite reach Supernal
in this corporeal body. In any event, a simple daemon such as Baroco would not
get in his way.
    Michael made a note that some questions
needed to be posed so that the parichoner must be specifically examined to see
if they understood how the correct answer may change over different contexts,
especially over that of time. That in turn reminded him to make sure the
Perpetual International Copyright Treaty was proceeding through ratification.
Celestial Voide inherently disliked spending as much money as he had to on the International
Church of the Crux Meta-Pacs to ensure the critical Senators’ favor. But the
lapsing of copyright was one of the few threats to the Church, not because of
specific intellectual property itself, but because of the ontological,
religious threat to the entire concept of a centralized Games Machine. Why
think about becoming a parichoner of the Crux when one could entertain and
educate oneself without a tithe? He was drawn back from this thought by his Angel
returning his message in his fluttering and apologetic manner—a manner which
Michael had an overwhelming urge to strike and hurt. No one would dare say a
thing if he were to do so. He listened, staring at his assistant’s chin.

Chapter 6
     
    Thirty years before, fully emancipated
from his diminished family, Joex was taking a well-travelled path from school
to career. He had studied and taught and wrote about computer science—real
computer science, which was origination of the fresh ideas manipulating and
mapping complexity groups into the human domain, not just applying the
algorithms of those who actually understood the issues of space, time, and
computability, and their application to real-world problems. But he had
changed. The turning point for him from scientist to engineer was at an
International Joint Conference in Boston in the 1980’s. He left utterly
disillusioned after seeing the track audiences filled to overflowing with the
presentations of charlatans touting the alleged machine modeling of cute babies
with breast-feeding mothers, while the key tracks in which the fundamental work
of systematic free intentional proofs were sparsely