The Martial Unity

At the same time, deep in Greater Tekvoria, Argenton stood in a laboratory, gazing at a brain frozen in a stasis field. Unlike normal human brains, however, the brain was transparent. It reflected light in a way that made it sparkle and dance about, creating an illusion that the brain was constantly shifting.

”This will be the vessel that elevates my consciousness to Transcendence.”

Argenton’s voice was one of conviction. His hand lifted, pressing against the walls of the stasis chamber, staring at the transparent, twinkling brain. The brain wasn’t made out of glass but rather a special meta-material that the tekvore had developed in the past fourteen months, using it to craft neurons that could fire signals of light.

The knowledge that he had acquired from the Emperor of Water, detailed knowledge of integrated information and phenomenological uniformity, helped him take NOVA’s framework for transcending mortal limitations and ensure it could fulfill the conditions for phenomenological uniformity.

He had even been inspired by the method of converting the bioelectricity of human consciousness into bio-photonics, creating a consciousness that was composed of light rather than electricity.

However, he refused to use the solution that Rui had used.

He wanted to create a brain that would not impede light whatsoever. Even in Rui’s brain, light signals didn’t move continuously, but rather only moved from one neuron to another, where it stopped, only for the recipient neuron to shoot another light signal.

Argenton wanted to create a brain where the light never stopped from the start of the neuron activation right down to the point where the energy of the neuron was lost due to inefficiency; only then would it be replaced with another light signal.

Of course, this was much harder than what Rui had done, where he simply changed the composition of the impulses between neurons, but nothing else.

Argenton wanted to change the fundamental relationship between the neurons and the messages they sent.

As far as he was concerned, neuron impulses stopping was a limitation entirely of biology, not consciousness itself. He was confident that with sufficiently advanced technology, it would be possible to allow consciousness to transcend the limitations of its carriers.

And the brain that hovered in stasis before him was his solution.

He had replaced the web of neurons with a lattice of nodes that were crafted from hyper-acute prismic logic gates. These logic gates would not stop light, but would conduct the same kind of logic-gate processes that occurred in electronics. The light would undergo a series of internal refractions and, based on its polarity, would be redirected in one of six dimensions.

However, he was very keen to avoid the mistakes that NOVA had made. She had simply converted her consciousness into a digital intelligence without caring for the underlying medium and the physical infrastructure, thereby destroying her integrated information by converting it into unintegrated information.

Argenton was different.

He intended to preserve his integrated information, and that was the purpose of creating this new hyper-photonics prismic lattice technology. It was an entirely new kind of processing infrastructure that explicitly integrated information.

He had come up with this technology after thinking about what integrated information actually meant.

”Integrated information is information that emerges from a system as a whole.

The question was how one could measure it and how one could ensure a replacement brain had it.

He wasn’t Dwight; he could create consciousness out of thin air from Transcendent power acting on the information dimension. If he wanted to preserve and create integrated information, then he needed to be able to measure it, to begin with.

”Integrated information was information that is lost when a system is separated into components.”

Computers didn’t lose information when components were separated. If those components were reattached, then the computer would function perfectly. He needed to ensure that whatever consciousness-infrastructure he created was so integrated that separating components would cause information to be completely lost, just as it was with the brain.

That was why he had created the concept of never-ending light signals. A signal that didn’t end from one prismic node to another was a signal that stretched on and on. Removing a component would be utterly disastrous in these circumstances to the overall information of the system of the lattice of prismic nodes.

Not only would it preserve integrated information, but he suspected that it would do much more.

He suspected that this would lead to a state of consciousness where all thoughts would become connected with all other thoughts. Since a light signal never ended until it died of energy loss, it would eventually pass through all lattice nodes. All light signals would mix with all nodes.

If that was the case, this would lead to all information being integrated with all other information in his brain.

His cybernetic eyes lit up with hope.

This was his true solution to the problem of fulfilling phenomenological uniformity.

From what he understood, phenomenological uniformity was information being integrated at the phenomenological level, which was an entirely metaphysical concept. He didn’t have the tools to directly interfere with the metaphysical layers of reality, but by integrating all information in the brain and mind with all other information, creating one singular ’thought’ that encompassed all thoughts, he suspected he could induce a state of what would ultimately be phenomenological uniformity.

”This… is our only hope,” he spoke with a grave tone on behalf of all tekvores. ”If this doesn’t work… then we have no path to Transcendence.”

Over the past fourteen months, he had already concluded that the path to phenomenological uniformity that the other pathwalkers took was likely not applicable to tekvores. No matter how much he meditated, he had never once experienced ’enlightenment’ as his Martial counterpart, Bodhisattva Maitreyi called it. He felt that psychologically, tekvores were simply not predisposed to this kind of thinking.

Rather than trying to do things the way Martial Artists, or elves, or dwarves did, he decided he was going to do things the way tekvores did.

”We integrated technology into our bodies to surpass our mortal limitations,” he declared with a tone of conviction. ”Now, it is time to do the same with our consciousness and our phenomenology!”