Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 599
metaphysics and essences behind appearances for the same
reason. Sometimes we need a dialog with the Other more than
we need life itself.
Most recently, we invented science. It brings us very
close to what we desire... close, but not all the way.
Marya reached the bottom of the stairs, and was faced
with a single long corridor stretching out ahead. She must be a
archives had been dug deep in hopes they would survive any
future holocausts. Ironically, peace had reigned evr since the
riots and shelling of the thalience rebels had burnt a quarter of
the city. The power of the Archipelago being what it was,
these archives would probably remain safe for millions of
years, whether they were below the earth or above it.
The people who designed Ventus lived in a more
uncertain time. They did not feel they could rely on
civilization to preserve human knowledge; with their recent
experience of nuclear wars, Marya supposed that was a
reasonable fear. She had been taught that the Ventus artificial
intelligences were designed as distributed nanotech in order to
make it impossible to destroy the information they carried,
short of incinerating the entire planet. It was obvious to her
now that if the Ventus design team had the technical means to
create these consciousnesses, then they were thinking in terms
of taking the functions of perception, investigation and
organization out of the human body and placing them in
idea was closely associated with thalience in theirs.
They denied the connection--successfully, too. Their
object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical
Categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed
the official view of Science in nature itself on Ventus, so that