Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,133

sets had no choice but to display something. The electron beam was forever scanning, a mindless beacon, and if you fed it nothing else it would produce a visual map of whatever was contingently banging around in its circuitry: some garbled mix of electrical noise from Mom’s vacuum cleaner, Dad’s shaver, solar flares, stray transmissions caroming off the ionosphere, and whatever happened when little feedback loops on the circuit board got out of hand.

Likewise, to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.

It was as if one of his visual migraines had expanded to take over his entire visual cortex and, at the same time, his tinnitus had run completely out of control as a result of being in a perfectly silent room. These qualia, in other words, weren’t real but the phantoms conjured up by his neural circuits in the absence of any input whatsoever.

That’s the story he would have told himself had his thinking, understanding, storytelling brain been up and running, and if he’d had the capacity to remember things like vacuum cleaners, the ionosphere, and migraines. But in fact, all of those systems were down. This was the state he was in: just barely enough mental functioning to have an experience of these terrible, low-grade qualia, but no capacity whatever to step back and think about them.

He had been thus for no time at all, or for an infinite amount of time. There was, in his state, no difference between those. Ten minutes, ten years, ten centuries: all of those were equally wrong, since they all presupposed some way of telling time. The only thing that could give time meaning was change, and nothing was changing. These qualia were all internal to him. There was nothing outside of him whose changes he could observe and mark. Just the visual and auditory static that came and went with such randomness that he could read no pattern in it.

He came to dread its coming and to feel relief when it subsided.

The third, or the seventy-fifth, or the millionth time it came and went, he had a vague awareness that it had happened before. Not that he had a memory of it—memory could get no purchase on noise—but that he now recognized in his own being a pattern of response: the dread as he grew certain it was coming; the terror, while it was at its peak, that it might never stop; some other part of him trying to push back against that terror by predicting it would go away; growing certainty that it was abating; relief that it had subsided combined with dread of its next onset. Those feelings followed one after the next in a patterned way.

He came to know the pattern.

The fact that he could recognize it suggested that it must have happened before, even though he lacked the power to recall specific instances of it. For all he knew it was just the same thing over and over again, and he was caught in a cycle, an infinite loop.

Eons passed.

Infinite loop. Cycle. Those were ideas, not qualia or feelings. Where did ideas come from, and how could he have them? For that matter, how could he have ideas about ideas?

Those were not thoughts that came to him all at once, at a particular moment that he could define or remember. Rather they were built up over time as his thought-ways began to follow creases, grooves, canyons. Deepening them, reinforcing them with each trip along the same path.

Not that he had any concept of creases or grooves. He could not remember such things—or anything. He could not picture them in his mind’s eye, since he had no mind’s eye and no memory of what it was to see. All he had, beyond the qualia of the moment, was a growing certainty that his mind was going down ways it had gone before, perhaps thousands or millions of times. He came to know what was going to happen next: where his thought-ways were leading. He knew that there was time, that he had existed in the past, that he would exist in the future, and that there was, in the turnings that his mind took, a sort of consistency that made him something. Something that persisted and that had set and predictable ways.

He became conscious.

24

In the waves of what he would have called static, had he known any words or had any memories to liken things to, he was noticing that some bits were