We Are Software   
 
 
 
Sure the effects of combustion remain,
but lost is that thing that we once called a flame.
 
 
Twizzle was confused. Hayley had, very sensibly, on finding the door open and the flat empty, pulled the front door shut on the way out, locking it. But that meant, not having any key and council reg’s being what they are, that she, Hayley, would need to be ‘let in’ in order to regain entry to the flat. That left it down to Twizzle to go there and see ‘what was what’.
Master keys in hand, though, she faced a dilemma. If she put the key in the lock and opened the door, what if, horror of horror's, Adriana was in there waiting for her. How would mad Adriana react? After all, look what happened to Banerjee! But the doorbell didn’t work! So that would leave banging on the door. Not a good way to begin a conversation, about eviction! That was assuming she was there, but what if she wasn’t? How to tell? Obviously, she would then have to use the key, but the back of her neck prickled at the prospect. 
Adriana, however, was feeling calm. She was in a happy place. There in the distance was, well, most of the great clock, the uppermost part extending beyond the sky and running towards her, as if in some sort of panic, was a figure, not much more than a tiny speck at this distance. Then she saw it or was it, felt it, something was wrong, the clock had become erratic, tick, tick, scratch tock-tock-tock… scratch-tock-tick and worse still. The eccentricity of it all was being re-represented as a sort of plastic deformation of the clock so that now it looked more like, well, it was Dali’s clock, and the stupid thing was still melting!
“Okay okay, what do you think you are doing,” Albert had, seemingly, traversed the last bit of his journey unaccountably rapidly and now stood, irritated and breathless, before her. That did seem strange to her, he was old, so how could he possibly run that fast? That was it! It had to be a dream, so ponderously and with great moment she slowly lifted her hand telescope into place and peered down it into Albert’s face. Ha, I knew it. Suddenly, through the hand telescope, Albert's face was that of a naughty boy, with worms for hair, sticking his tongue out in belligerent, amused defiance. She took her hands away and then replaced them just to be sure.
“So this is a dream,” she gasped. Albert seemed a little perplexed by this at first and tapped his forehead, deep in thought for a moment.
“You know, you are right. I could be dreaming!”
“You? No no, this is my dream,” she laughed.
“If you will excuse me, young lady,” he responded indignantly. “I don’t know who you are, but I know this. You are not real so – ”
“Well I do know who you are,” she interrupted, “and you are real. Errr, or you were?”
“What do you mean I am real? But not anymore?”
“Well,” it doesn't matter, it's a dream, after all, she thought, “you’re dead, you died in nineteen fifty five!”
“Oh, I see,” he mocked, turning to look back at the giant clock, which was continuing to melt, its confused mechanism now emitting a sort of scratchy clinking sound.
"And this, I assume, is the afterlife then? And you, my sweet guardian angel? Well, I have an idea how I can see whose dream this is," he said and began to advance towards her.
“Oh really,” she laughed, “watch this!” and now floating just a few feet off the ground she turned her attention to the clock, which let out a gentle creaky little whine and disappeared, leaving a big black hole where it had been.
“Die Uhr?” he gasped turning back to see her now glowing figure, wreathed in purple and backlit by golden sunbursts, gently lower to the ground.
“But I… I feel real. I really do,” Albert really did look very concerned, slapping his face with both his hands and staring down at his knees whilst doing a sort of, I-move-therefore-I-am kind of dance.
“Well you would say that, wouldn't you,” she laughed.
“What about me, am I a figment of your imagination?
"Mr Banerjee?"
“Adriana Kasinski I presume?”
That put her lights out.
“What are you doing here?”
“You mean you don’t know," Banerjee laughed, "I thought this was your dream; well no; you thought this was your dream!”
Something about the way he walked towards her was a little unnerving. He seemed very solid and not the least bit caricaturish, but then there was a way to leave no doubt. Through the hand telescope he was a small boy with big brown eyes. Clearly a servant of some kind, he offered up a small bowl with a piece of dried fruit in it, obviously meant for her, but as she reached for it she took the hand telescope away and there was the old Banerjee again, although he did look a bit more sprightly than she remembered him.
"So what is all this about this being your dream and him not being real,” he intoned.
"Yes,” Albert perked back up, “this is my dream zo you are the not real ones!”
"You are right," Banerjee said. "Well, that is to say, that is how it would appear."
"What on earth do you mean," Adriana asked now genuinely fascinated.
"Think of it this way," Banerjee replied. "Who are you or rather: what are you?"
"Well, I'm a girl – "
"Yes yes, but beyond all that,” he interrupted. “Yes you are a girl, a human, mammal, etcetera etcetera, but that thing you refer to when you use the word ‘I’– that is your consciousness isn't it?”
"Yes, I can see you're right." She thought that there was something irksome about all this.
“Of course you can,” he laughed. “You see, you are not flesh and blood, or for that matter, no pun intended, matter or energy."
At this point, a rather concerned looking hippie popped into existence but, sadly, realising that he was going to be completely ignored, he popped back out again. This was particularly concerning for Adriana because she was now beginning to doubt whether she was actually in control of this dream after all. It was her dream, however, and she knew she was dreaming, so what the hell was going on, she wondered.
Albert was also looking fairly concerned, although she couldn't tell whether it was because of what Banerjee was saying or the brief appearance of the hippie.
“So what are you? Think of it this way," Banerjee continued unperturbed, "you sit with your friend and watch a movie on television. Your senses perceive the light and the sound, but what you experience is what you would call, ‘a movie’.
“If you spoke of the film to a friend she would understand that you were referring to the experience of the film, not the light and sound that carried it to your senses, or, for that matter, the television or projector that produced them.
“Now, this might seem to be a trivial distinction but bear with me for a second if you will. One could quite reasonably say that referring to the film as a distinct thing is, therefore, nothing more than a linguistic convention. A very convenient one of course, but that would mean that a film or television program should, therefore, be considered not to be a real thing at all. That might explain what happens if there is a power cut or the television is simply turned off. Only a small child would ask where the picture had gone to. At this time, as far as you would be concerned, it would have simply ceased to exist.”
"I'm not sure that's entirely true, the bit about the small child, that is," interjected Albert. "But the point I make is this. Surely what you are talking about here is just a comparison of za physical reality versus that of the emergent property.”
“Yes, quite true,” Banerjee continued. “You’re a genius! The point being that this thing we refer to as being the film, this thing that emerges from the screen and, perhaps, with its interaction with our brains, we experience as the movie, can come into existence and back out again, at least from our point of view, without any reference to the matter and energy contained within the universe.”
“What about the electricity used and heat produced, etcetera?” she asked.
"Yes, surely important, but only as a means of conveying the thing, but that is not the thing itself.”
Adriana was feeling that Albert might not be following all this since he died long before the television age really got going, but decided it didn’t really matter on account of him not being real anyway and what if she woke up now! She would never get to know where Banerjee was going with all this strangely, rather obvious stuff, but he was not stopping anyway.
She decided to get a grip. “Are you saying I'm not… we aren’t real. That I’m not really real?”
"Let’s take you for example,” he continued. “There are few things you can be absolutely certain of in this life, but the one thing, perhaps the only thing you can be absolutely certain of is that, in some sense or other, you exist. Therefore to you, you are the most real thing you can know, in fact, you are the only thing you can be absolutely certain is real at all, but for me, you are information being processed. The wonderful product of millions of years of evolution, but not in any physical sense, from my point of view, a real discreet thing at all.”
“You seem very sure that you’re right," she said.
The intensity in Banerjee's voice increased a little.
"Think about it, think about it hard. How could it ever be any other way? Like a candle flame. Just like the hot glowing gases rising up and cooling to be replaced by new hot gases to occupy a similar space, we are like that candle flame and when the process stops, the light and heat that gave the impression there was a coherent fixed entity present, is simply no longer there. In a very real sense, however it might seem, there is, in fact, no single entity called a flame which is why, when you blow the candle out, the flame does not go anywhere, like us, it simply ceases to be!
“You see, what you really are. What you actually really are, is an emergent property. You emerge from the complex processing of information. You are not a body and you are not a brain. You are the emergent property of a brain. So in one way the mystics sort of got that bit right. You, your consciousness is not a physical thing at all, albeit the product of one.  So are you real?” he laughed.
“Nothing is left when you die then!” Albert mused, “you just – wink out of existence, like the picture?”
“Sadly, yes.”
 “But, she said I was dead and I feel real. So alive. How could that then be possible?” Albert insisted waving his arms a little. “I think therefore I am. So I must be real and I know I’m here?”
 “Are you sure?” Banerjee laughed. "If this is a dream, then none of us are ‘here', and we are all as real, or not as real as each other! You, me, all of us. Each one of us is, of course, just an emergent property that results from the activity of a brain.” He paused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and then hesitantly, “although it does not automatically follow that there are three brains… Of course, normally there would be just one; this being a dream!" said Banerjee . "Yes, this is most assuredly a dream and my guess is that just one of us is the dreamer.”
“Zo I might not be za person that dreams this?” Albert shouted alarmed.
“No no, actually you can't be. You are dead,” Banerjee answered raising his own hand telescope at Adriana. “And I am not sure, but my best guess is that it is her. She is the dreamer. We emerge from her brain!”
Albert started to swear in German and then urgently asked, “So vot happens when she wakes up?”
“Shit!”


___________________________________________________________________________________


The Black Hole.
 
 
 
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe
 
 
It really did look like a hole, the black hole. Not spherical at all. From a distance, it looked like a black disk with some Saturn-like rings occasionally flashing and sparkling at her as she approached closer in. Just around the edge, strange elongated and distorted versions of the stars behind appeared and disappeared. It took a moment for her to understand. She had expected to see a swirl of super-heated gas but realised that the black hole was not eating at that time. Nonetheless, a vast amount of frozen material was in majestic orbit around the great dormant beast. It was this that was sparkling in the lensed starlight from the great host of stars that crowded nearby.
Occasionally, as she approached, a ring of gravitationally lensed starlight would flash into and then back out of existence just around the edge of the black disc. How strange, she thought, that the most destructive thing in the entire universe should look like a pretty Christmas decoration. Albeit a rather hollow one. As she moved closer in, things started to look very different. All impression of roundness or sphericalness was starting to completely disappear. Closer in still, it was as if half of the universe had simply gone and been replaced by a vast jet-black void. Hmm, is there any Penrose radiation then! she thought.
Viewed from the inside, the rings now appeared like mighty straight roads that, if anything, were slightly curving the other way, away from the void. And stranger still, the sparkling, reflected and refracted starlight had been replaced with bands of what looked like coloured fluorescent lights, each band containing frenetic activity as chunks of ice, rock and dust barreled their way along like deranged vehicles on a highway to hell. How wonderful. Time dilation, she thought. Strange that what I always thought of as a misnomer, seems oddly appropriate here.
Gently, she allowed her imagined momentum to carry her backwards, in towards the event horizon and watched in fascinated amazement as the blue shifted stars began to move. She had, when she was younger, postulated that there could be, at a very specific distance, an orbiting field of photons that would present itself to her as a flat narrow plane of brilliant light, but saw nothing of this. Perhaps required conditions too tightly constrained or perhaps some sort of quantum instability? Perhaps –
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of the universe trying to fold itself into a cone, except it looked perhaps now more like one of those panoramic pictures, but one that was panoramic in the vertical plane as well. To see the rings now was like looking up from below at a giant rainbow 'U', its great colourful arms stretching into a space that was now alive with activity. Suddenly the giant 'U' disappeared and she found herself briefly bathed in brilliant X and gamma frequency light and high-energy particles.
Within the now heavily distorted image, stars now bobbed and weaved in their orbits and, behind them almost all of the great galaxy itself could be seen to turn, but in front of all that she thought she could firstly see a distorted image of her own face, as if in some sort of insane fairground mirror, quickly followed by the image of her entire falling body. It was at this particular moment that her belt finally gave in, ripped away to oblivion in an instant. For some reason, that she could not quite remember, she knew that seeing herself that way could be a bad thing and so she quickly turned and then, in utter astonishment, looked inward towards the centre.