Jacob's ladder
Chapter 18: Epilogue in the second echelon

“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 herheart!”

Silence...

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

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

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

“What about her? Is she still downthere? 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 replace the port usedby the hacker to get in. Lydia didn’t get much information, but Blatsov saidsomething 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 himfrom getting back in.”

“Until he replaces another way.”

“He’ll replace it harder the next time.”

“Boys, Lydia has opened her eyes.”

“How are you, Lydia?”

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

“Her gaze is confused.”

“How would you be after such ashock?”

“Yes, she’s just suffered theexplosion 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 gettingout 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 agood symptom.”

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

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

“Wait a minute, Max. I’m going tointercept 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 followedyour 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 thesame.”

“Look, she’s smiling, the danger ispassed.”

Silence.

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

“Speak up, Igor.”

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

“But it came out all right, we savedthem, 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 notin danger.”

“That’s wrong, Igor, you shouldn’twish 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 likeyours.”

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

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

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

“Then you are happy?”

“No one may be fully happy aboutanything, there are always things which could have been done better, but inthis 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 tryto 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, myplan was clear in my head and I chose my words with care, so I’d be able tokeep 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 dutyto keep it does not depend on the character of the receiver. If I had broken mypromise, I’d have felt myself degraded to his level.”

“Don’t lecture me about ethics.”

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

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

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

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

“But Igor, it’s the sameresponsibility we accept when we beget a child. Down there, before making thebomb burst, while I was waiting for Luis and his friends to get away, I hadtime 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 thereal world.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This discussion is similar to SaintThomas Aquinas’s second way of proving the existence of God! He says that thesuccession 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 anauthor.”

“We are digressing.”

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

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

“Lydia, what you say looks a lot likeour Jacob’s ladder! It had four echelons, unequally separated. By the way, whydid 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 itseemed at first sight. I suppose you know that Jacob’s ladder is in the Bible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Epilogue in thethird echelon

Alternative history isa recent genre of fiction which deals with historic facts, but at some pointgets 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 theoldest works in this category is Mes songes que voici, by André Maurois,written in the nineteen thirties. My novel combines this type of fiction withanother, more classic genre, science-fiction, which finally gains control andlets historical speculation fall into the background, although in the first twoparts of the book it seems about to play a very important role.

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

The ninth chapter, where thebifurcation takes place, describes the battle of Waterloo exactly as ithappened, with a single decisive change: in real life, Napoleon made themistake 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 armytime 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 turningpoint does not get much attention and soon becomes drowned in the disastersprovoked by the invasion of Nikomakos’s army of automata, which of course neverhappened. Austria was not overrun by those armies, nor was czarAlexander I of Russia murdered in 1815: he died in his bed ten yearslater.

I have invented the term histopredictorfor a future profession, a branch of historians who will predict alternativehistories scientifically, assuming that some things could have been different fromreal life. They differ from Isaac Asimov’s psychohistorians becausethese will only try to predict future historical developments, not analternative past.

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

The simulation of historicalprocesses is today impossible. So is artificial intelligence, in the sense usedin this book. We are very far from being able to build intelligent beings withfeelings and free will, and it is not clear that we will be able to do it. Atthe current level of computer science, I can risk making this prediction: resultslike those in this book will not be reachable during the twenty-first century.However, if something like this would ever happen, ethical questions like thosedescribed here will be someday the object of discussion. I hope that humanbeings will be able to solve them satisfactorily, although there are manyprecedents on the contrary.

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