Jacob's ladder

“Awake, Lydia, awake!”

“Are we losing her?”

“She is in a coma!”

“She is in shock!”

“Let me get to her, I’m the doctor! Away! She hasn’t air to breathe!”

“An eyelid has trembled!”

“She has moved a finger!”

“Will you shut up? I can’t hear her heart!”

Silence...

“Her heart is OK, but she’s suffered a strong shock. If we leave her in peace for some time, perhaps she’ll recover by herself.”

“Did you hear, boys? To your places! We have a lot to do!”

“Can I put the experiment in stand-by, Igor?”

“What about her? Is she still down there? What do you think, Marco?”

“Lydia has disconnected.”

“Can we take her helm off?”

“Why not?”

“OK. Max, proceed with the stand-by.”

“Done.”

“Let me see if I can find the port used by the hacker to get in. Lydia didn’t get much information, but Blatsov said something which may be useful.”

“What?”

“The three firewalls he had to cross. Here is the map of the computer network.”

“Let’s see...”

Silence.

“I have it!”

“Have you identified Nikomakos?”

“No, but I know how to prevent him from getting back in.”

“Until he finds another way.”

“He’ll find it harder the next time.”

“Boys, Lydia has opened her eyes.”

“How are you, Lydia?”

“Don’t pester her, she has still to recover.”

“Her gaze is confused.”

“How would you be after such a shock?”

“Yes, she’s just suffered the explosion of an atom bomb, no less!”

“Not exactly, just a simulation.”

“Eh, she has focused her eyes! Lydia! Can you hear me?”

“Mmmmm.”

“She wants to speak! She’s getting out of the shock.”

“Shut up! I can’t hear her.”

“What...? Where...? Where am I?”

“Easy, Lydia, you’ll soon get well.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“You were in the virtual world.”

“You provoked a nuclear explosion.”

“But you are back now.”

“Do you remember?”

“Let her speak!”

Silence.

“I remember... Luis?”

“She wants to know about Luis. It’s a good symptom.”

“We still don’t know. The experiment is in stand-by, but I don’t think the explosion has harmed him, they were several kilometers away from the epicenter, at the other side of the mountain.”

“I can take a look. Shall I start the experiment, Igor?”

“Wait a minute, Max. I’m going to intercept the hacker. Done, you can proceed.”

“OK, here they are. They are safe, but very surprised by the explosion. They are walking on; Luis has followed your instructions exactly. Lydia, listen! Did you know that you were an angel? Luis has just said it.”

“That’s no news; I’ve always said the same.”

“Look, she’s smiling, the danger is passed.”

Silence.

“Now that things are slowing down there, we should discuss what has happened.”

“Speak up, Igor.”

“Lydia, you’ve run a big risk. You’ve been imprudent.”

“But it came out all right, we saved them, the hacker is out and the experiment can go on.”

“But it could have gone all wrong; your life was in danger.”

“Fortunately, Blatsov was mistaken.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember, Igor: if you die here, you’ll probably die there too.”

“True, that prediction was wrong. Maybe he was also mistaken in the other one.”

“Which one?”

“If I perish here, Nikomakos is not in danger.”

“That’s wrong, Igor, you shouldn’t wish anyone’s death.”

“What, not even a hacker? OK, Lydia, I won’t insist, but at least I hope that he’ll have suffered a shock like yours.”

“He must have felt something. Since the explosion, he did nothing until we disconnected and intercepted him.”

“Tell me, Lydia, if you had the opportunity to go back down there, would you hesitate?”

“Not at all, we know now that I was not running such a big risk. I don’t think things may get much worse than what I’ve experienced there, and I got out alive.”

“Then you are happy?”

“No one may be fully happy about anything, there are always things which could have been done better, but in this case there’s something I’m especially proud of.”

“What?”

“I kept my word with Blatsov.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I promised him that I wouldn’t try to escape or raise my hand against him.”

“But you made the bomb burst!”

“But I didn’t raise my hand to do it. I just let Jacob’s ladder fall into the groove. When I made the promise, my plan was clear in my head and I chose my words with care, so I’d be able to keep my word.”

“I wouldn’t have worried about that. I don’t think deceiving people like Blatsov is immoral.”

“When you make a promise, your duty to keep it does not depend on the character of the receiver. If I had broken my promise, I’d have felt myself degraded to his level.”

“Don’t lecture me about ethics.”

“That’s not my intention. I’m just explaining how I see it.”

“All right, leave it. We’ll just agree to disagree.”

“There’s another reason which makes me happy: after speaking with Luis, I’m sure that running the risk was worth while. I told him so.”

“I’m not convinced that our characters should have human rights. They are our creation.”

“But Igor, it’s the same responsibility we accept when we beget a child. Down there, before making the bomb burst, while I was waiting for Luis and his friends to get away, I had time to think. Will you let me explain my conclusions?”

“Speak on.”

“What if we also were imaginary characters, for instance, in a novel?”

“That’s absurd! We are living in the real world.”

“I just want you to identify with Luis, Charles and the others.”

“Lydia, this is very interesting! If that were true, we’d have a ladder with three echelons: our virtual world would be the first, we would be in the second, and the author of the novel in the third.”

“Even more, the author of the novel could also be a character in another novel written by another author, and so on, ad infinitum.”

“Not ad infinitum. Sooner or later, we’d stop at an author in the real world.”

“Can’t there be an infinite succession of authors, each a character in a novel written by the next?”

“I don’t think that would be a reasonable assumption.”

“This discussion is similar to Saint Thomas Aquinas’s second way of proving the existence of God! He says that the succession of causes cannot be infinite, therefore a first cause must exist, which causes all the others but is caused by nobody.”

“It is also similar to the fifth, which says that the world needs a creator, as the characters in a novel need an author.”

“We are digressing.”

“I don’t think so, Igor. Listen, Marcos mentioned three echelons. I see four, unequally separated. Assuming that we are the characters in a novel, and that our author is in the real world, there would be a further echelon in the ladder, because human beings in the real world can be considered the characters in a novel written by God, whose plot is the universe. God is both immanent and transcendent. He builds the universe from inside, but is hidden from us, as the author of a novel is hidden from his characters. If that were true, we’d be nearer to our virtual world than to our author, because two fictions, one inside the other, are nearer than either of them from reality, but the greatest distance separates the real author from God.”

“Great authors, such as Shakespeare or Cervantes, sometimes introduce a play inside a play or a novel inside a novel. There are three levels: Shakespeare, the real author; his play, A midsummer night’s dream; and the play inside the play, Pyramus and Thisbe. Or Cervantes, the real author; his novel, Don Quixote; and the novel inside the novel, The curious impertinent. If we count God as the author of both Shakespeare and Cervantes, we have the four levels.”

“Lydia, what you say looks a lot like our Jacob’s ladder! It had four echelons, unequally separated. By the way, why did we design it like that? And why did we give it that name?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Neither do I.”

“This is getting deeper than it seemed at first sight. I suppose you know that Jacob’s ladder is in the Bible.”

“Yes, Jacob dreamed about a ladder going from the Earth to Heaven, with angels going up and down.”

“If Lydia is right, we are on the second echelon of a ladder getting from our virtual Earth to Heaven.”

“I say, you are right! And angels go up and down the ladder! At least one angel did, or so Luis thinks.”

“How can we have devised such a meaningful symbol without being aware of it?”

“Perhaps Lydia is right, and we are after all the characters in a novel, and all this symbolic meaning of Jacob’s ladder has been introduced by our author on the third echelon, to give us a wink or inkling for reasons of his own. What do you think, Igor?”

“I think that you’ve lost contact with reality. You’ve been speaking such foolishness, that I had to disconnect.”

“Perhaps you are right, but you know what the French poet, Paul Éluard, said: There are other worlds, but they are inside this one.”

“By the way, Max, what about the experiment?”

“It’s recovering slowly from the chaos generated by the hacker. I think it may be useful after all, proving that history is able to resist sudden fluctuations, to recover from important instantaneous unbalances, even from all the disasters provoked by Nikomakos. Let’s keep watching.”

Epilogue in the third echelon

Alternative history is a recent genre of fiction which deals with historic facts, but at some point gets away from reality and tries to analyze what would have happened if... if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo, as in this book. Perhaps one of the oldest works in this category is Mes songes que voici, by André Maurois, written in the nineteen thirties. My novel combines this type of fiction with another, more classic genre, science-fiction, which finally gains control and lets historical speculation fall into the background, although in the first two parts of the book it seems about to play a very important role.

The historical facts mentioned in the book follow real history in the first eight chapters, except by the introduction of fictional characters (Luis, Charles, Pierre, Gérard, Blatsov...). Jacob’s ladder, the supposed amulet of Bonaparte’s superstition, is also a fictional element.

The ninth chapter, where the bifurcation takes place, describes the battle of Waterloo exactly as it happened, with a single decisive change: in real life, Napoleon made the mistake of waiting until the ground was dry before launching his attack, fearing that his canon would get stuck in the mud. This gave the Prussian army time to arrive and allowed Wellington to resist the attack. From that point, the novel gets away from real history, but focuses on the fictional characters. Therefore, the alternative history which could have started at the turning point does not get much attention and soon becomes drowned in the disasters provoked by the invasion of Nikomakos’s army of automata, which of course never happened. Austria was not overrun by those armies, nor was czar Alexander I of Russia murdered in 1815: he died in his bed ten years later.

I have invented the term histopredictor for a future profession, a branch of historians who will predict alternative histories scientifically, assuming that some things could have been different from real life. They differ from Isaac Asimov’s psychohistorians because these will only try to predict future historical developments, not an alternative past.

The simulation of virtual worlds has advanced a lot in the last few years, but it is still centuries away from what this book describes. The word avatar is used in the technical lingo of this field of computer science to name the simulated individual representing a real person who goes down and acts in the virtual world. The word comes from Sanskrit, where it is applied to the incarnations of Vishnu as a human being (such as Rama, Krishna and others).

The simulation of historical processes is today impossible. So is artificial intelligence, in the sense used in this book. We are very far from being able to build intelligent beings with feelings and free will, and it is not clear that we will be able to do it. At the current level of computer science, I can risk making this prediction: results like those in this book will not be reachable during the twenty-first century. However, if something like this would ever happen, ethical questions like those described here will be someday the object of discussion. I hope that human beings will be able to solve them satisfactorily, although there are many precedents on the contrary.

Finally, I have to report an interesting mystery. My characters at the second echelon confess that they don’t have the faintest idea what gave them the idea of giving the name, Jacob’s ladder, to their amulet and antenna. Finding it laden with deeper layers of knowledge, they wonder if it may have been an inkling or a wink introduced in the novel by their hypothetical author in the third echelon (i.e. by me). I must confess that I was as surprised as they were, cannot give any reasonable explanation and have no alternative but refer the problem to the next echelon.